feeding off companies

It's 8.30 am, I am already in the office checking out my emails. I am in early today because at 9 am we have this presentation skills workshop for the office staff, in the company I work for. Another training session! Again! Not that I am against whatsoever, but there are so many that it's becoming ridiculous.

Working has become a very competitive area of our lives. We compete for job places we'll complain about later which take long periods of recruitment processes. We compete with ourselves and other canditates to get this or that job and mantain it and be the best at it. The constant need to be brushing up and refreshing our skills in whatever job we are doing; learning new computer programmes which in theory speed things up has becoming a very energy and time demanding aspect of our daily lives if you really want to keep up with this constantly changing job market. But is this that cost- and time- effective? Does the time and effort we "put in" in this pay and actually improve our performance? Training courses which repeat the same old theories and communication strategies make it telling and retelling and rephrasing what we have been told and repeated a number of times in the past.
In a way, this so-called on-going education is part of this capitalist system we are in and can not scape from of creating jobs places and of companies feeding off other companies and feeding other companies at the same time, keeping the dynamics of economy moving and flowing. Recruitment agencies, training providers, experts in managing whatever area and/or problem you can stumble upon in an office, communication experts, stationary and serigraphers and a long list of jobs which very much depend on one another.

Yes, I am talking about office jobs. I am pretty sure that this also applies to a wide range of jobs from plumbers with new more ecofriendly central heatings and how to instal them and hairdressers and new techniques to dye or cut our hair and shop assistants to learn how to deal with difficult customers to managers and directors to learn how to cope with stress and all the new IT systems, the latest way to negociate and overcome culture clashes when dealing with say, foreing investors, etc.
That applied to teaching is basically down to the so-called teacher development courses to get new ideas, to welcome and embrace the use of technology, to learn from others' experiences, to overcome fears ...nothing new really, but now, lots of money flow with this.
We are all constantly learning how to operate new tools, items of technology from a simple DVD player to the latest more time efficient way of carrying out our tasks at work. It is the world we live in, constant taking in and some cashing in on it too.