Randy’s Career Tips

Perhaps you’ve applied for a personal support worker position and the employer tells you that your responsibilities and duties will also include performing community outreach services. You may ask yourself what exactly is outreach service?

Outreach, or as it is sometimes called community outreach, is a form of support work that takes place within a clients home. A number of individual’s that require the care that a personal support worker can give them still live at home, and aren’t in need of around the clock help. This is why outreach programs have been created.

As an outreach worker you will be assigned a schedule that will outline the various times and dates that you are to visit a clients home. Usually these visits are in blocks on one-to-three hours.

After getting to know the client your tasks will become almost routine. You may need to help clients with the usual range of personal support worker activities, which we won’t delve into here, but you will also be responsible for some if not many of the household chores such as cooking, laundry, mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, etc.

Another variation of community outreach is respite care. Respite care workers take over for another care giver. This can help to create a style of teamwork between the workers and also helps to break up a portion of the care responsibilities.

Ultimately whether outreach is for you comes down to a personal preference. Some may see the one on one nature of outreach care as a positive, as it can create a more intimate relationship with a client. Others may see this as a negative and prefer to work in a home setting with a variety of different clients.

Before applying for a personal support worker outreach position you should ask yourself, with the above knowledge as your guideline, whether this position is the right fit for you person (more…)

Getting a travel job is becoming a lot easier and tangible as time goes on. It’s also becoming apparent that most travelers keep running into this same mistake over and over again.

I can still remember the time I got my first travel job. It was glacier guiding up in Juneau Alaska. Nothing can beat those mornings waking up surrounded by massive mountains filled with ices falls and wildlife.

After that travel seed was planted it started to grow like wildfire. I ended up flying around the world as a travel guide for teens, snowboard instructing, race directing and whatever little jobs I could picked up along the way.

I didn’t think life could get any better until I got home and realized I had avoid the truth of the matter and truth about my travel jobs lifestyle.

You know how in life there are lessons that keep presenting themselves time and time again until you learn it? What’s funny about this is most of the time we don’t learn it and just except it as reality. Well not this time I was going to learn from this mistake.

It all came down to one winter when I was in Utah ice climbing and teaching snowboarding. I few friends and I loved ice climbing and so we took a trip down to a exclusive place in central Utah called Joes Valley.

We showed up and as always, we had a ton of fun. We played on some small icefalls and then we took off to some bigger falls. After following a map we ended standing at the base of a 150 ft. icefall. This was definitely the biggest fall we had ever dealt with. While staring up at its massiveness my friend with a hesitant look asked me “You going to lead this?” In my pride and desire to push my limited I said yes. This was the start of a long journey.

I grabbed the rope and tied it on, check my crampons and ice axe and got my ice screws ready. I was ready it (more…)