The carecareers blog

Later this year I will be setting myself a goal of climbing 3,143 metres to the highest summit in Indochina, Mt Fansipan in Vietnam, to make a difference to the lives of young adults living with cerebral palsy.

This industry has given me the opportunity to discover and develop my strengths as a leader and as a professional. With the skills, knowledge and experience I have gained so far I am well placed to continue to be an effective leader within the sector. I have chosen the human services industry as a career and I will continue to open many new doors as the opportunities arise.

If you had asked me when I was at school if I thought I would end up in disability work, I would have laughed uncomfortably and said “I don’t have what it takes to do that job”. Now after 3 years in the sector, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.

My name is Jacqui and I’m a Coordinator with Northwest Disability Services, in the area of flexible respite for families with children with disabilities. I’m going to start this blog by telling you all a little bit about my journey and how I got to be the Australian Trainee of the Year in 2009.

Deb Howard speaks of the opportunities she has had to acquire skills and undertake workplace training since becoming a support worker

My name is Rachel Murphy and I am 28 years old and my disability is Down Syndrome. I am employed at Greenacres Disability Services where I work on packaging jobs, such as first aid kits, downlight kits, oyster lights and a wide range of other packaging and assembly tasks.

As community workers we become geared with the knowledge and the opportunities to engage the wider community in acknowledging and valuing people in our lives who require additional support. For Lifestyle Solutions an effective way to start a conversation about good support was through our recent information night.

Over 120 people walked through the doors to hear about who we are, what we have to offer as an employer and what we are looking for in future employees. It was an overwhelming response considering only 22 people had registered their interest in attending.

I wanted to write about a typical day for me at work as it demonstrates the variety and reality of my type of role, as a Support Worker in the sector.

A ‘right’ skilled worker might be a sport nut, they might like to garden, they will be a good at listening or picking up cues, they might love facebook, they might hate facebook, they might be a member of the local biker club, they might like to cook, they might like to watch people cook – or they might just enjoy eating good food after it has been cooked!

I had a few preconceived ideas about working with adults with a disability. I thought that the work would be consistently hard and more physically demanding, but it’s not.

Years before having children I worked as a Special Needs Assistant at a pre-school in Wagga. I enjoyed this work but found that the activities I did were limited to the age and stage of the children that I worked with.

No, this blog post is not about how to turn yourself into a lady of the night (or a lad of the evening for that matter)! It’s a number of reflections and thoughts about what a person can do to give themselves every chance of landing ‘that’ job in the disability sector.

I know from speaking to many of my friends at uni that there is stigma attached to working with people with disabilities and many misconceptions: that you have to be some kind of angel, have high levels of experience and work long ongoing hours.

Poppy describes her motivations for working with a non-profit service provider in the disability and community care sector

Working in this sector is undoubtedly the most rewarding thing I have ever done.

Whilst I’ve been in the workforce for over 37 years, it took me a little while to get into HR – 10 years in fact!