4 Necessary Skills for a Career in Adult Care

Perhaps you are currently still in high school and are looking forward to choosing your options at college and then university. Alternatively, maybe you are already working full-time in an entirely different industry and are interested in switching to a more rewarding career. Working in adult care is as challenging as it is often intensely and emotionally rewarding and if this is something you have been thinking about, then you have come to the right place, as here are four necessary skillsets for a career in adult care.

Patience

First and foremost, it is essential that anyone even remotely considering a career in adult care is someone who can keep a calm demeanor and a cool head in potentially stressful or highly-strung situations. 

If you are intending on working in an assisted senior living community, you will naturally be working with older people and, even more likely, elderly people. This often requires an advanced and more ‘hands on’ adult care plan, which again requires a high level of patience. 

Luckily, there are a number of ways you could look to improve your levels of patience, including:

• Practicing mindfulness and deep breathing
• Stop blaming others for your lack of organization
• Practice active listening skills
• Figure out your triggers for losing patience 

Excellent Communication Skills 

Taking care of another person, whether that be your partner, your child or your parents, takes time and dedication and even though you are not blood-related to the older men and women you are tasked with looking after, you still need to treat them as such. This is especially true in the adult care industry.

Essentially, this means that your intuition must always be turned to the highest mark and that instead of assuming what you think they are asking for or indeed, what they want, employ active listening skills and utilize strong and highly developed communication skills in every single interaction. 

A Compassionate Nature

Next, it would be rare and also, mutually destructive to find a person who is admittedly single-mindedly looking after themselves and places their own happiness and progression over anyone else’s (no judgment), working in an adult care home. 

The natural and driven inclination to always take care of others before yourself is one of the overarching necessary qualities for anyone who is even remotely considering a career in the adult care industry. Those in this industry must always be sensitive, supportive and understanding at all times. 

Unwavering Reliability

In a more traditional office job, if you are due into the office at 9am on a Wednesday morning and you do not actually turn your work computer on until half past, short of an informal telling-off from your boss and smirks from your colleagues, not much in terms of value is lost.

However, when working in the adult care industry, you become, almost overnight, a veritable lifeline for the people who you are looking after and therefore, if your time-keeping skills are somewhat lacking, or you are admittedly unorganized and unreliable,  this will negatively impact the emotional health of the people you are supposed to be caring for.