My Formation Continues - OFII Formation Civique Part 2
No one knows the day or hour when OFII will convoke you for your formation civique, but it will probably be inconvenient.
As I mentioned previously, the first part of my required civics training courses, aka formation civique, ended with a cliffhanger. Instead of scheduling the fourth and final session during the third class, we were told something about budget cuts and uncertainty.
So I walked away from that thinking it'd be months before I got a convocation for the last class.
Instead, it was four weeks later and I was given 10 days notice. And the fourth session was scheduled for a SATURDAY. What was this madness?
I'd already planned and booked a mini break to Bordeaux, so had to cancel and exchange all that for the end of the month. Just a minor inconvenience, definitely not worth the hassle of trying to contact OFII and reschedule. Who knows when the next date would be? Better to get things over with.
L'emploi vs. Culture
The fourth formation is meant to be more of a workshop style program than the first three courses, which primarily involved staring at PowerPoints for six hours. Ostensibly, we had the choice between a cultural theme or an employment theme.
I say ostensibly, because the culture atelier was more popular than the employment one (I wonder why) and some people who chose culture got stuck in employment.
I chose employment, for reasons that are unclear even to me. Maybe I thought it would help me prepare for finding work in France? Maybe I thought I knew all there is to know about French culture?
We're Going to Do Group Work
Going into the formation civique, my preference would have been for it to be what I'll call passive learning. As in, I'd just get to sit there and not have to actively participate in class. Please, just give me credit for showing up and hand me my paper at the end. That’s all I wanted.
That wasn't really the case for the first three classes and it definitely wasn't the case for the last one, particularly after the formatrice informed us that we were going to work in groups and that we'd have to rearrange the desks to form little clusters.
Oh lord help me.
Many of the people in the class were the same as those in the first three classes with me, plus a few newcomers. Maybe about half of the class was Francophone, and the rest had a Russian or Arabic interpreter.
But the formatrice insisted that we not split up by language, but instead be mixed in together. So my group was me, two other French speakers, and two Arabic speakers. It was really me and one of the other French speakers who carried the work of the group, then finally that single French speaker when she decided she didn't like my contributions. The other French speaker decided that taking a nap would be a better use of her time.
Oh well.
The Content
So what did we do in this workshop style, employment-themed class?
First, we started out making "Carte Mentales," which I guess is the same thing as a mind map. We had to brainstorm, in our groups, all the things that came to mind when we thought about employment.
Then we had to talk about job hunting related things, like the difference between savoir-faire (hard skills) and savoir-etre (soft skills), the elements that combine to make a job ideal for you, and so on.
Going in, I think I thought the workshop would be focused on the vagaries of getting a job in France, but it was more like job hunting 101 for people who had maybe never tried to get a job (in any country) before.
We did another quiz game, and as during the first part of OFII training, I won. I’m very good at tapping on answers quickly.
Let's Make a CV
After lunch, we went over the elements of a French CV and were given the assignment to make a CV for a fictitious person trying to find a random job. "Pick an easy job," the formatrice told us.
Thing is, I already have a French CV, created when I applied for a job in Toulouse. I thought about suggesting using that, but the person who had more or less made themselves the leader of our group took charge and decided we were going to make a CV for a math teacher.
"Pick an easy job," the formatrice told us.
Okay, so look, it's tough enough trying to make a CV for yourself, for a job you want. Let's just say it's like 1,000 times harder to make one for a job that doesn't really exist in a field you don't really know. Also, in my case, it is really hard to do in French.
In the end, we had to share our CVs with the class, and the formatrice gave us feedback on them. This would have been way more useful if they were real CVs and not ones we'd just thrown together for fake people.
L'attestation
Why suffer through the formation civique? It's all part of the integration contract and is required if you want to stay in France, for certain types of visas.
At the end of the program, I received an attestation confirming that I completed the four required courses. I'm to present that form to the prefecture when it's time to renew my carte de sejour.
As with every other precious piece of paper I've been given, I need to guard it with my life and not lose it, as I will not be given a duplicate.
Formation Civique Recap
I get that integration into French culture is important and that a lot of people may be moving to France with zero knowledge of how the country works or may be coming from places with vastly different belief systems.
And I get that OFII can't exactly tailor the civics training to everyone's needs; they've got to put something together that serves the least knowledgeable person. That said, I think it may be valuable to offer some sort of dispensation to people who may be further along their integration journey than others, just as they offer a dispensation that lets you get out of the languages classes if you can prove your French level.
Was it worthwhile? Eh….
I don't want to say I got nothing out of the formation civique. I did learn some interesting and potentially useful things during the employment workshop, at least. But I'd already completed most of the administrative to-do's by the time I took the courses and I really didn't need to spend four days of my life sitting in a classroom with Powerpoints and busy work.