How Hard Is It to Get a Job as A Personal Support Worker?

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Why is it hard to get a job as a personal support worker? The popular responses boil down to the oversupply of PSW graduates and the natural consequences of microeconomic theory. But we’re not talking about casual job seekers here, PSWs are essential workers anywhere.

From afar, the work these workers do can seem simple, even comprehensible. But because of the growing number of lifestyle diseases and life-changing injuries, it has never been this difficult to enter the personal support worker field. In fact, it’s more common than ever for people working in support to feel burned out at their job.

It takes a great deal of effort to get hired as a PSW, typically involving several hours of practice and preparation, alongside a mountain of student loans. From the onset, it’s clear that there is supply and demand – so why is it still hard to get hired?

Instead of floating around cliché responses on the difficulty of getting hired as a personal support worker, let’s poke around the facts of the matter. Here’s why finding a job as a personal support worker is harder than you thought.

Know About Getting Hired as a Personal Support Worker

Personal support workers alleviate suffering. Their years of training, coupled with their commitment to helping out, enable them to support everyone from the elderly to anyone else who might be in need of their help to perform everyday tasks.

Workers who work in this field are also problem solvers who test and implement solutions to end suffering – they meet the needs of their clients, from the simple to the difficult.

If Personal Support Work is in Demand, why is it so Hard to Get a PSW Job?

In all seriousness, the reason why you are yet to get hired as a Personal Support Worker despite graduating comes down to a matter of supply and demand – economics. Besides job opportunities, economics also affects PSW pay.

While there is a growing demand for personal support workers around the world, there are now as many (maybe or probably even many more) PSWs in the world. Putting it another way, personal support workers are not extremely rare.

That means your degree is not your golden ticket to a personal support worker job (in some cases, a degree is no guarantee that you will get hired anyway). Staying away from the debate of whether or not a degree is worth it today, you are better off expanding your skill level.

How to Get Hired as a Personal Support Worker

Assuming your academic credentials are in order, what you need now is to work on your skillset. Expand your experience to other related fields to fashion yourself as a one-size-fits-all candidate – the kind of PSW everyone would want to hire. It is not enough to simply specialize.

Personal support work is one of the most in-demand jobs. The key to finding a job is to know where to look. You need to select a personal support worker job search platform that will automize the process. This way, it will be quicker to get a job in your field.

The Bottom Line

Personal support workers are the unsung heroes of the healthcare sector. It is thanks to their skills (and, of course, their good hearts) that people who need help performing everyday tasks are assisted to live happy lives.

William Reid
A science writer through and through, William Reid’s first starting working on offline local newspapers. An obsessive fascination with all things science/health blossomed from a hobby into a career. Before hopping over to Optic Flux, William worked as a freelancer for many online tech publications including ScienceWorld, JoyStiq and Digg. William serves as our lead science and health reporter.