How to prepare for your first job
Teresa Loftus | 30 Jun 2022
Starting your first job is a milestone which brings a mix of excitement and angst. Knowing which transferable skills and accessible tools to use will help you ease into your new role.
Here are some tips and resources that we have compiled together to help you prepare for your first place of work.
Watch our video for tips on moving to employment
Our Assessment Services Manager, Teresa Loftus, and DSA Centre Manager and Subcontractor Manager, Beck Lambourne, cover the main resources and tips to help you move on to employment and plan for and overcome additional disability related barriers.
Apps to support you into work
Never be late for an interview or work
Alarmy allows you to set custom and recordable ringtones to help you get out of bed. It also lets you choose what information you might like to see upon waking, and back up sounds and time pressure settings that work for you.
Plan your travel
Trainline helps you plan your journey ahead of time, which is ideal to do in advance of an important interview, or to help you plan how you might commute to work.
Stay organised
Trello allows you to create easy lists, cards and boards which can help you manage your workload and minimise the chances of missing tasks. You can add tasks, completion dates and work with others too.
Remember a meeting/conversation
With Otter.ai you can focus on the meeting rather than taking notes. With the agreement of the team, Otter.ai records the audio and then produces very accurate notes of the meeting or conversation.
Transferable skills
What you learnt in education are all transferable skills, so the apps and software will also be useful in your new workplace. Also, use My Computer My Way to help bridge the gap before additional specialist software is in place.
How employers can support you
Access to Work
If you require reasonable adjustments to your new place of work to help with a disability or long term physical or mental health condition, then the Access to Work grant can help pay for additional support. Access to Work will also give advice and guidance to your employer to raise awareness of the support available to employees with physical and mental ill health.
How to apply for an Access to Work grant. This factsheet provides an overview of the Access to Work Scheme, a grant to help disabled people to start or stay at work.
Don’t Disable Me Lived Experience courses
Employers are welcome to join our Don’t Disable Me lived experience training series to increase their confidence in providing an accessible and diverse workforce. From these courses employers will learn how to describe the types of physical impairments people experience, and to understand through real life stories the unintentional barriers we can create and how we can remove them.
View the training courses here
How AbilityNet can help
- Speak to one of our experts about workplace assessments and identifying reasonable adjustments
- Find out how your organisation stands on disability inclusion with our GAP analysis service
- Keep up to date with accessibility and inclusion news with the AbilityNet newsletter
- Find out about AbilityNet's free live webinars
