carecareers will be at the upcoming Reinvent Your Career Expo on September 8 and 9 to provide jobs information and careers advice for the care sector.

The show is a magnet for people who are thinking about a career change, and the exhibitors include a huge variety of employers and educational institutions offering people a new direction in life. The expo is a natural place for carecareers to be, as so many of the people who have built rewarding careers in our sector have done so after starting out in another industry. The experience that these people bring is frequently invaluable and helps to enrich our sector.

If you’re thinking about a career change, but have not quite made the leap yet, why not visit carecareers at the 2012 Reinvent Your Career Expo? You can meet our team of friendly staff as well as some of the people who work for organisations in the sector. We are there to offer advice on what kind of employment in the care sector might suit you best. There are hundreds of positions available, so who knows, there might be one just waiting for you.

Our Feature Job this week is Tulgeen Disability Services, who are seeking a Supervisor for their Riverside Nursery. This is a Temporary Full Time position for a period of six months, and the successful candidate will be coordinating the delivery of the Riverside Nursery’s services as well as providing support and training for the employees of the service.

The Nursery provides retail and wholesale nursery services as well as a document shredding service. As part of Tulgeen Disability Services, this business offers supported employment and vocational training for people with disability.

Closing date: 13 August 2012

When you consider it, the workaday existence is more than a mere salary. and I think we get a stronger sense of who we are from our job, even though many would be quick to retort, ‘I am not my job!’ For me it is necessary for a healthier outlook inside and out, as it were. For me, tThe self-respect that comes from working again for me is immeasurable and working in the disability sector gives this more credence. I never take a single day for granted and I feel fortunate to be in a better place in my life at this time now than I have been in the past. I have a good friend who, like me, is transgendered and she has faced hard times and a downward career ‘path’ since transitioning ten years ago. This is the case for most transgendered folks I have known; they transition and their work/career suffers. Some manage to escape this quandary, but many don’t.

A career in the disability sector for me is still relatively new after twelve months employed by Companion Card. Initially, I worked as a volunteer doing telephone research on a casual basis for a short time and then the work stopped. I had all but forgotten being advised there may be more secure work for me with NDS in the near future and managed to get on with looking for work in other places and pondered meekly if that work would materialise.

It did and it was quite out of the blue.

Before this phase of my life, I had worked in publishing and before that teaching English in Japan. I have done countless other casual jobs in the past, working in hospitality, on farms in remote Australia, shelving books in a library and toiling under great anxiety in call centres.

My previous job was in publishing (in 2008) and that feels like an age ago now. I had a spell of two long years of not working between then and my job now and it was the hardest time of my life. Frankly, I wondered if I would ever work again and then I had this fortuitous breakthrough.

I had been looking for work for the previous year, getting interviews with no luck and was close to leaving Sydney for a more ‘sedate’ existence in coastal Queensland. I was so close to packing my car and driving north! But I did have my eye on doing some training to be a nurse, but the course was not due to start in for almost a year from then. I had been accepted into a two year nursing course with Sydney University and that was my final gambit to make a go of my life in Sydney. The course was a fast tracked nursing degree and was one year less than the usual study time.
Before this phase of my life, I had worked in publishing and before that teaching English in Japan. Oh, I have done countless other casual jobs in the past, working in hospitality, on farms in remote Australia, shelving books in a library and toiling under great anxiety in call centres.

Since NDS, my previous job was in publishing in 2008 and that feels like an age ago now. I had a spell of two long years of not working between then and my job now and it was the hardest time of my life. Frankly, I wondered if I would ever work again and then I had the fortuitous breakthrough.

If you find writing a cover letter intimidating, you are not alone. At the carecareers Careers Centre, we often speak to callers who find making the first steps very difficult.

There’s no reason to let writing a cover letter scare you away from making applications. The best advice I’ve been given is to approach a cover letter like an answer to a question: irrelevant information will not attract your employer. Always be direct and always write a new cover letter for each application – we recommend changing your resume for each new position also. Every decent application does take time.

How do I start?