Managing Director, Gordon Anderson, reflects on care as a career…
“It is a source of great sadness to me that care is often viewed as an unskilled job. People look at care and think it is low paid, with few benefits and fewer prospects. I would strongly disagree.
In the first instance, care is a highly skilled job. It may not require a degree (although care qualifications up to the highest level exist for those wishing to go down that route) but it does require an even greater skill than anything that can be taught – people skills. Empathy and compassion are essential in the role and many people don’t realise how important that is until they are in the position of having to receive care themselves.
Furthermore, the career of a carer offers fantastic benefits. If you ask any member of my team, they will tell you how rewarding their job is. They love being able to go home knowing they have made a difference to someone’s life. That may be a big thing like getting them out of bed in the morning or ensuring they are washed and dressed, but its also the little things that count … being a companion or that person who raises a smile on someone’s lips. These are the things that matter in life.
However, there are material benefits to care as a career – the most important of which is flexibility. We have over 80 carers on our books and none of them work what we would traditionally call ‘regular’ hours. Many of the team work set hours per week, to allow them to enjoy their hobbies and interests around work. Here at Cavell Healthcare, we encourage our team to have a healthy work-life balance, which gives them the double benefit of making a difference in their community AND investing time in things that are important to them personally.
Furthermore, the care profession is one which not only has a guaranteed future (after all, with an ageing and growing population, we will always need care), but which also has growth and career development. Many of our team started as care givers and are now in supervisory or management positions, having not only progressed within the company through in-house training, but also having studied for national recognised qualifications.
So, if your first thought about care workers is ‘low skilled and no future’ I urge you to think again. The reality is that care work is one of the most rewarding jobs which has the added benefit of real career development. I am proud to work in this sector and I am proud of each of my team who make a difference in the jobs they do. In my eyes all our care staff are professionals, they are not unskilled and are never in any way amateurs; the Oxford English dictionary tells us a “professional” is ‘someone who makes a living doing something that someone else plays at’; caring for our communities is how we make our living and our staff are fully trained Care Professionals.”
