AFTER more than two decades climbing the ladder in retail, Allison Jones from Tameside thought she had closed the door on her working life for good.
Retirement, after all, is supposed to be the reward for years of hard graft. But it didn’t take long for the quiet to feel unfamiliar.
“Not long” into retirement, she realised she wasn’t ready to stop altogether. At 55, she wanted something different – work with meaning, work that mattered.
That search led her into social care, joining Lifeways as a support worker. Three-and-a-half years on, she is still certain she made the right call.
“Honest to God, I wish I’d done it 20 years ago,” she says with a smile. “It’s brilliant, honestly, it’s brilliant.”
For Allison, the shift from sales targets and store management to supporting people with complex needs was a leap into the unknown. Yet it revealed strengths she didn’t know she had.
“You get chances to do things that you’ve never done before,” she explained. “When you’re looking after someone with these specific day-to-day challenges, this is up to us. We’ve got to make sure that they’re safe.”
She is quick to dispel any rosy misconceptions about the role. Support work, she stresses, is not easy.
“You can’t come in thinking you’re going to sit in front of the TV all day or go out for lunch every time,” she said. “Those are nice things to do, so are day trips out. But it’s the work leading up to there. It really is hard work but if you put the hard work in, then you get the rewards at the end by seeing their faces.”
Those ‘rewards’ are often moments others might overlook – but to Allison, they are everything.
“You come in one day and they’ve made the bed. They’ve never done it before. Or they make themselves a sandwich, and you just go, you did that. Might have taken two years, but you did it. It’s really good,” she said.
“Tying the shoelaces, putting the shoes on properly, getting yourself dressed in the morning, being independent in the shower. And it’s all a learning curve for absolutely every one of us. And that’s a challenge for me.
“And when I come out the other side, and I come out the other side holding their hand, it’s amazing.”
One message she is keen to share is that care work isn’t only for the experienced or formally qualified.
“I don’t think you need any experience because, depending on where you work, everybody’s individual. You train yourself around the people that you’re supporting because they train you how they want to be supported.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise in her second career has been returning to learning. Long after she thought exams and classrooms were behind her, Allison found herself studying again.
“It’s brilliant because all I ever knew, I mean, like I said, I came out of sales at 55. And that was me done. And school and college and everything, you think that’s me done learning. I learnt to drive in my twenties, and I thought, yeah, that’s my last exam. And it isn’t. And you’re learning things every day. And you get paid for doing it as well, so that’s alright,” she grins.
Her story comes at a time when adult social care providers across Greater Manchester continue to face staffing shortages, with an ageing population and rising demand for support services putting pressure on the sector. For Allison, though, the motivation is simple.
“This has got to be what you want to do. It’s got to be a vocation.”