I've also been on the dole a couple of times, and I agree very much with your post. Every now and then we would also be sent to a "job application course", as if what we really needed was to become more clever in writing job applications.

On the positive side I must say this "class" had visions of getting all of us employed, and it succeeded more or less on that. I got a teaching position at that very same school, teaching Java to a class of people that for different reasons (mostly health-related issues) couldn't continue in their old jobs. Well, that was also a bit pointless, half of the class was there just because that's what was required for them to continue being on government handouts - they weren't really motivated to learn programming. Some of my students were actually sincerely interested in learning programming ... unfortunately that's not enough - people are born with different skill sets, and also, the older people get the harder it's to learn new things. Of course I did my best, and those students also did their best, but deep down I knew they were never going to become decent programmers. There were one person that was both motivated and had the right kind of intelligence, and he did pass the exam. I don't remember if he was the only one - the results were horrible, but allegedly I was still doing a much better job than the previous teacher they had. This class had been learning programming in different languages for several years already, but nobody knew any programming. But I digress ...

What otherwise healthy and intelligent unemployed people need is first of all a job. Nothing is as destructive as sleeping long every day and not having anything at all to do except playing computer games. In the same time, there is so much work to be done out there ... anything from litter picking, giving the kinder garden buildings a new layer of paint, doing development on open source software, etc ... if the government has enough money to build big administrative offices, employ bureaucrats, and even hand out money to people doing nothing, then they could as well pay people for doing simple useful work.