The Unofficial Cockermouth Jobcentre Plus Mirror

Cockermouth's former Jobcentre Plus office

Jobcentre Plus is a UK government inspired set of offices where Jobs are advertised and the unemployed may access services both to claim benefits and aid their return to gainful employment. At a time of increasing recession the government has decided, counter-intuitively, to close a number of these offices in Cumbria (including the one in Cockermouth, where ZOIS is based). This leaves a general-purpose web-site as the main way of accessing vacancy information. That web-site is open to criticism from the technical stand-point and is thus the inspiration for a web-scraping and integration Technology Demonstrator that, unlike the other stuff (lame pretend shops and the like), we'll leave up on the grounds that somebody might find it vaguely useful.

A national version of this work is available throught the 'Navigation' forms on the right, or bottom.

The Demonstrator scrapes the Jobseekers Direct web site on a periodic basis, for vacancies posted as being within 15 miles of ZOIS's base in Cockermouth cleans them up and then displays a three-day list of those vacancies which appear genuinely local (posted in the still open Workington, Whitehaven, Cleator Moor and Maryport Jobcentre Plus offices). There's an RSS feed set-up on that page too. As an example of how RSS can be generally used we'd direct you to the Cockermouth RSS example page. Finally, an experimental Twitter Account has just been set-up.

This is a Technology Demonstrator and wholely dependent on the Jobcentre Plus and lately the Jobseekers Direct web-sites for content. It's their content and although they don't actually state it, it's probably their copyright too (so we accept no liability for the content). If anybody is unhappy about the subject-matter of this Demonstrator let us know and we'll happily take it off-line.

To all you aspiring Lynne Truss-types out there, 'Jobseekers Direct' seems to be the official spelling. No apostrophes.

A National FTP Feed

We're also doing a national scrape now too, based on this Cockermouth work. The feed is processed as a Comma Separated Values files and is put on the ZOIS FTP site in the JCP directory on a nightly basis. There are some README files explaining formats and so forth. If you would like an e-mail feed based on an individual Jobcentre Office then let me know. The Author link is at the bottom of the page.

Since nobody else seems to be doing it, we've sort-of produced a sort-of national version of the Cockermouth Mirror. One fills in a form with your location and we return a sorted list of our guesses as to your local Jobcentre Plus office. You can then follow the links and see what they've posted in the last 48 hours or so. Bookmark that search (or use RSS) and you can return on a daily basis until you find what your looking for. Or give up in despair. We've written some more explanation about this too.

Updates

Twittering

The Cockermouth JCP Mirror is now posting vacancy details on Twitter. This is as much an experiment as anything else and we'd invite feedback. 2011-08-25

Whitehaven JCP Posting Again

The Whitehaven Jobcentre Plus office appears to be posting under it's own code again (WHV). As does Maryport and Cleator Moor. Keswick vacancies are now being posted in Workington rather than Kendal, Keswick's JCP office was closed at much the same time as Cockermouth's. These changes were noted mid-month, although they may have occurred earlier; so we've now changed the definition of what constitutes West Cumbria. 2011-08-15

Cockermouth's RSS

To show how easy it is to use things like the Cockermouth JCP RSS feed, we've put a little page together as an example. 2011-03-19

Whitehaven JCP No-longer Posting

Whitehaven Jobcentre Plus office is no-longer posting vacancies on the Jobseekers Direct web-site. Responsibility for posting vacancies in Whitehaven and surrounds seems to have passed to Workington. Although this has been a prelude to shutting a Jobcentre Office in the past there is, as yet, no indication that Whitehaven's JCP Office will close. It does make our probing for West Cumbrian vacancies simpler. 2010-04-21

Jobseekers Direct

The primary focus for the scrape is now the Jobseekers Direct web-site. The Jobcentreplus search site is scheduled to close next month. 2010-02-15

Original Posting Reference, Facebook and Twitter

Some quite clever, unnecessarily clever, code has been added on the job-detail page which allows you to visit the original posting on the Jobseekers Direct web-site. Their page should open in a separate tab or window if your browser allows it. Less clever code now allows you to post the vacancy on your favourite social web-site and thus share it with your 'friends', 'followers', 'contacts' or whatever. 'Favourite' is a definition currently limited to Facebook and Twitter at the moment, more will be added as they become fashionable. 2010-02-18

Thank you for your interest.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Jobcentre Plus Mirror Search

We've two search interfaces to the database. One based on the local Jobcentre Plus office and the other on an ad-hoc search.

Find your local office: 

Example: "chester".

Or, alternatively, try typing this kind of query: something in somewhere. Everything's optional. Experiment!

Find: 

Example: "painters or plumbers in wakefield".

Please send feedback about these searches.

Also of Interest

Juicy morsels from the rest of the site:

• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for the author too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, the author can still bore people in the Historic Third-person.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.