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Jobs at Aberdeenshire Council

Chloe Brown – Care Team Co-ordinator

After leaving school I went to university to undertake a degree in Psychology and when I finished I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I was qualified for so ended up working in an office as an Accounts Administrative Assistant. I had been in the job for 2 months when the company starting undertaking redundancies and although I was never made redundant I started panicking and looking at where I could work with some job security and applied to be an Assistant Internal Auditor for Aberdeenshire Council. While in this position I realised it really wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life but I wanted to stay with the Council so therefore I started  looking at all the different Job Profiles for positions within the council. I realised I liked the sound of working as a social worker and would only need to complete a few years as a post grad to achieve this however I needed experience in a care setting for at least two years first. I then s the advert for a Modern Apprenticeship in care, in a care home and I thought I would just apply and see what happened.

I managed to get the position and then started to panicking as I had no idea if I would even enjoy working in care or would be the right kind of person to do it. However, from the minute I started the job, I love it and being able to help the residents when they needed help gave me so much job satisfaction that I realised I had found the sector I wanted to be in. The apprenticeship was very well organised and I had so much support throughout to the point that I would not have even had to care for a service user by myself if hadn’t felt comfortable. It was a great time to work with and it was very bittersweet to be leaving the position but it was a fixed term contract. My Modern Apprenticeship lasted a year, during this time I gained my SVQ2 qualification and a lot of experience in dealing with a wide range of Service Users and I really enjoyed it.

As my Apprenticeship was ending I was again looking at different job roles to apply for and by this point I knew I wanted to stay working with older people so was applying for jobs in care homes, home care and within care management for older people. I was offered 2 different positions following my interviews, the first was a Care Team Coordinator, working within the homecare service in Peterhead and the other was as a Local Area Coordinator in older people based in Banff and I accepted the Care Team Coordinator position as it was closer to home.

Again when starting this role I had no idea what to expect as I have never worked in the home care sector and therefore did not know what the Care Team Coordinators actually did day to day. The majority of the job is arranging care visits, answering queries and dealing with concerns from the home carers about service users and being a line manager to the home carers which includes ensuring they are adequately trained and doing their jobs correctly so that we can provide the best care service possible. I enjoy that no two days are ever the same in the office, I enjoy that it is always busy and there is always something to do and there can be a lot of problem solving involved in my role. I also enjoy that we get to deal with the service users and do our best to ensure they are receiving the best care for them, I enjoy hearing from them when the carers are doing something really well but I also enjoy trying to work out how to do something better if an aspect of their care is not working for them as an individual.

Working within care can be challenging but there is a lot of job satisfaction when a good job has been done and someone’s quality of life is improved because of it. Experience in a care setting can also lead to many different career opportunities as it is such a wide sector and there will always be a need for care.