What Work will be Best for Me

Why do I want to work?

Being at work can provide much larger benefits to our wellbeing than earning a wage. Not only can you be proud of being employed but positives people have talked about include, socializing and making friends, having a positive purpose to get up for, a focus away from life stresses and worries, building opportunities for a career.

People work for different reasons, and one benefit to knowing what work you would like to do is understanding your own motivation to work, in most cases there are two main motivational types, intrinsic and extrinsic. Simply these are doing something because it’s what you want to do (Enjoy your job, intrinsic), or doing something because you want the result from it (Wages, extrinsic).

A good example of this is two people who run a marathon, person one loves running and goes out most days. Running is their hobby and they decide to push themselves and run a marathon distance, they train and complete the marathon and raise £5000 for charity. Person Two wants to raise £5000 for charity and does it by training and running the marathon. Both people did the same thing with the same results but each did it for very different motivations.

Whatever motivates you, looking for work will be individual, hopefully you will find many more positives from being employed in the future.

What Job role would I like to do?

There is a famous quote from Marc Anthony “If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life”

There are thousands of different jobs out there, many of which you will have never heard of. But a good place to start thinking about what type of work you want to look for is with what you enjoy doing. You may have skills and hobbies in a certain area, could you work in a similar field? This may not be a direct link, but if you enjoy helping family and friends have you thought about helping others in a care role? Or if you love baking at a weekend, could you work in a cake shop or supermarket bakery? Really look at what gives you pleasure and how you might link this into a job.

Where can I commute to?

Knowing how far you are willing to go to work will give you a good search area to look for employment. How will you get to work? And how long are you willing for that to take? Will you walk, drive or use public transport? By working out all these will give you your search area for work. If you can’t find any employment in your area this may be something that you want to come back and reevaluate, some people work very close to their home, some people travel for hours each day, and some move to live in a commutable distance to the job they want.

How many hours? (affects to benefits)

Depending on your own personal circumstances and what impact your health has had upon you, the number of hours you choose to work is completely up to you. We support people to find employment from a couple of hours a week up to returning to full time employment. Depending on how long you have been out of the workplace it may be worth considering starting with a part time role to rebuild your energy to be at work.

Earning an income will have an impact upon benefits you receive but in most cases, being in paid work is more profitable to you than benefits alone. You can look on websites like www.entitledto.co.uk to see what benefits you may be entitled to and how working would affect these. For a more personal understanding we suggest requesting a meeting with Citizens Advice Service who can do a full benefit calculation for you.

Vocational Services in Dorset