the most basic job skill

I work in a welfare office doing substance-abuse assessments. The purpose of our program is to get people off welfare and back to work.

My clients have a number of problems that interfere with their ability to find and maintain jobs: substance problems, mental health issues, criminal justice histories, homelessness. These are real problems, and they interfere with people who are otherwise ready to work.

Some lack basic job skills, and for these, there are some services to help them learn these skills. There is some question about the effectiveness of these services (there are, actually, a large number of deep questions about their effectiveness, to the point that the services might need to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch... but they are there, nonetheless).

I just got a call back from a client, for whom I left a message a week ago. This brings up what I think is The. Most. Basic. Job. Skill:

Ya gotta show up.

If you can't do that, you can't do anything else. And some of my substance-abuse treatment is just about that: setting a schedule for the client to which he or she is expected to adhere, and then making strategies and plans so that he or she can adhere to it, and imposing consequences for failure to adhere to it.

(In other news, both my excellent wife and I work in welfare offices. When we're at our most cynical, sharing client stories, we have a saying: "There's a reason they're on welfare.")