It is widely accepted that job-hunting is a stressful, disheartening, and sometimes even degrading process for just about anyone. It is also known that certain groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, women, or LGBTQ+ people may find the job-hunting process even more complicated, and the same is applicable to disability.
At the start of my job-hunt I immediately ruled out any jobs that I couldn’t physically do. For example, being a personal trainer would not be an advisable career path for me. I often struggle to reach things in shops so stocking shelves in shops was out of the question. I would be a trip hazard in an industrial kitchen so working as a chef or waitress was not a viable option. This left me with office jobs. Administration. Paperwork. Pen-pushing, as some like to call it.
I then had to consider the commute; trains are just too unreliable as a wheelchair user to get to and from work, as are taxis. Buses were the only viable option, and even then rush hour traffic would make the journey long and gruelling. So I now had additional limits of suitable locations too.
I signed up to a few employment websites, and sent my CV off to as many people as I could like an over-excited puppy. A large chunk of these replied to tell me that I couldn’t work in their office because I was in a wheelchair; their office was inaccessible. One office wrote to tell me that they were equipped to take manual wheelchairs only, so if I was prepared to subject myself to agonising pain on a daily basis they would be happy to consider my application.
All these restrictions, of course, came on top of the usual expectation to have thirty years of work experience by age twenty, and to have five PhD’s to boot. This left me with an incredibly limited number of jobs that I could apply for in the hopes of actually getting a job.
The majority of the jobs that I applied for rejected me on the basis that I had little work experience, as I couldn’t physically manage to work on top of my studies. I had written for a university magazine, been a secretary of a society, and had started this blog, but most places did not consider these to be proper work experience. Only one invited me to an interview. Clearly the stars aligned on this occasion because a couple of days later I received a phone call (in the middle of the supermarket, no less) telling me I had the job. While the contract was not exactly lucrative and the wage certainly did not come to much, I was just happy to have a job.
There was a long period between finding out that I actually had the job and starting work, as there was a lot of paperwork to complete, so in the meantime I took to going out to cafes, coffee shops, or the library on a daily basis to write. I would write things for my blog or I would write articles for Cracked, the latter of which I received a little money for. As someone who gets bored quite easily and is then an absolute nightmare to be around, the writing aspect of my life quite literally saved me from going completely out of my mind.
Little did I know that after only seven months in my job I would be let go. It was suggested that I continue working for other administrative roles in the NHS, but given that most of these were in an inaccessible office and the remaining shifts were so few and far between as to amount to nothing, it was far more viable to pack it in altogether. At least this way I would have the relevant paperwork to hand, hopefully meaning that when I did eventually land a new job, half of the paperwork would already be complete.
Even though I only have a little work experience to date, I was at least offered multiple job interviews throughout this second period of job applications. However, as I got negative result after negative result, I became increasingly disheartened. Then, one Monday afternoon while sat tapping away at my keyboard in the local geek hidey-hole, the phone rang. I had got a job, but not just any job. I would be joining one of the top medical research facilities in the country as a data management assistant, which was nothing short of my dream job. Now all I have to do is not mess this up.
