Maybe I'll fiddle around with this more when time permits. Admittedly, it's not a hugely important requirement right now because I'm the only one on my team that accesses VC, so if something fails, I can simply log in to see why. I was surprised to find that there's no "easy" way to do this though - given all of the zillions of other things that VC makes easy, why not this? 🙂 Maybe this is an idea for an enhancement - add a new task type under "internal" called "get job tasks" or something, which would take a job name or ID as a parameter, allow the user to specify what column(s) they want, and return the data in the same type of format that you can specify with an SQL task (i.e. text qualifier, field delimiter, etc).
On a related note, I went digging through the VC folder yesterday trying to figure out where the DB file is so I could try creating a connection to it. I'm not sure that there is an actual DB file - I found an XML file that seemed to contain all the settings for all my jobs, which was getting updated every minute (because I have a job that's scheduled to run every minute). It might be possible to read that file using a combination of VC's XML tasks to accomplish what I want.