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Those of you who work - what is your job?

illustrated.lady

If you don't want to read and would just like to answer the question then thank you - feel free to skip Slight smile

I suppose I'm looking for some inspiration.

In what is a familiar story for many, I am completely burnt out from my work, struggling to cope in an office environment and really just feeling at a loss of what to do. 

A bit of background on me for anyone interested - I'm fairly intelligent and well educated (BSc Psychology and Criminology, MA Sociology - graduated 2018) but I have never been able to transfer this over to the workplace, I have ended up off sick with stress/anxiety/overwhelm in every job I've had and the longest I have lasted in any job is my current three years.

My jobs have included - 

Food service

Retail

Care (elderly, dementia, mental health)

Call Centre

Medical reception/admin/secretarial (current job)

I have worked all hours from 12 hour days, 12 hour mights, 9-5, full time, part time, zero hour contract. I always end up burnt out. 

Ultimately, I have to work and ideally full time. Office work is a struggle because there's people there, constantly with their smells and their noises and their conversation. 

As much as I loved elderly care, I think my sense of justice made it too difficult to overlook the poor management that understaff care homes in order to make as much money as possible. 

I just don't know what to do, I don't need to find a dream job, I just need something I can do and go home and not feel like all my energy has been drained. 

Any ideas, comments, suggestions, all are appreciated.

Parents

  • I work full time as an employment specialist for people with disabilities. There’s a lot of pros and cons to it. On one hand I feel fairly fulfilled with my work and I have a pretty flexible schedule. On the other hand, some of the clients are really draining me and there is a lot of stress to get people jobs in a timely manner (which of course, is not always possible or plausible). So it’s going okay overall so far, but I might burnout at some point.

  • in reply to profdanger

    I can see this being quite stressful but also it's such important work and must be fulfilling. Do you mind me asking, how did you get into it and did you need any particular qualifications?

Reply Children
  • in reply to illustrated.lady

    I don’t mind at all!

    So I just happened to search for “autism” jobs on Indeed and “Job Coach/Employment Specialist” came up as a possibility. There was actually quite a few openings for employment specialists in the area I was moving to this spring, so I applied to two or three positions. Now an interesting aspect is that what I do is paid for by the state I work in, so I don’t know if they have something like this in the UK. I hope so!

    As far as qualifications, they don’t have any in particular for this job, but one thing that has been a huge help for me is that I have experience in a wide variety of jobs (education, custodial, retail, and factory). Having that experience ahead of time really makes communicating with different employers a lot easier. It sounds as though with your own job experiences, you’d probably do well at it.