So, as I wrote about earlier, about halfway through my hospital stays I became unemployed from a set of circumstances that were entirely beyond my control. In my head in fact, 2020 was going to be this wonderful year where I set about a new career that was going to be in equal parts challenging and rewarding, making me use my current experiences while also making sure that I was constantly learning and developing on the job. It was going to put me out of my education bubble that I had survived in and I was both nervous and excited for the challenge. I had been preparing to go into the police for over a year with the application process being a lot of different tests that needed to be passed in order for them to accept you.
This clearly was not what fate had planned for me.
When I lost my job and realised that at least initially I wasn’t going to be able to start in the police as I had planned, I had to get a new plan together and in my thought, relatively quickly. I didn’t have a job and I did have obligations and responsibilities.
While I was in hospital, I looked at, and applied for, lots of different jobs. I looked in education, as that was what I was used to and felt comfortable with, but I also looked at various different other things. It wasn’t until I started really talking to my partner about work that I realised that his work place were hiring as well.
My partner works as a residential care worker for children aged between 9-18 and the company that he works for has two homes that they run (soon to be three but thats nothing to do with me). He works at a house exclusively for boys with Social, Emotional and Mental Health problems but his place has a sister house who operate with both boys and girls with complicated behaviours.
Approximately two weeks after I got out of hospital, I was going for an interview with them. It was a bit of a different experience from a normal interview experience. Due to COVID 19 we all had to stay socially distant throughout the interview meaning that we were sitting at different ends of the tables. There was a group interview stage, talking through scenarios involving children though interestingly it wasnt just about how to deal with the situation but also why the young person might be acting the way the scenario was talking about. After that there was a normal face to face interview with three of the senior members of the team. All very formal and it felt a bit scary at the time! I felt like the interview went as well as possible and they said that they would contact me at the end of the day to let me know whether I had got the position.
And so I had to wait until the end of the day to hear that my employment conundrum had been solved! I got the job and subject to references and a DBS check (which I was confident of passing) I was now happily employed as a Residential Care Worker.
And so the new stage of my employment began…