Vocational Rehab

[mike22]

I want to know if anyone has had any experience with their stateś respective vocational rehab program. I ask because I like what they can do but I worry that I am relying to much on them to look for a job. I have completed my degree and capable of looking for a job on my own. I wanted to use them to give me a little extreme steam in this search.

[iolaire]

Sorry didn't notice this post way back.  I have 20 years ago experience with Alaska Vocational Rehabilitation, not exactly what you are asking for, but something I'm now thankful for.  They helped to pay for college for me with the goal of getting me into a career that I could hold onto if my Lupus flairs back up (and maybe they knew more about the long term effect of my kidney damage than I did).  Now as I'm on Dialysis I'm thankful for that group trying to get me to where I am today, in a decent office job that allows me to leave work early 3 times per week to get Dialysis.  (I still need to send a thank you note to that office if it still exists.)

[deckerj]

I know this is an old thread, but I just wanted to comment that I had a very good experience with Voc Rehab here in Arizona. Granted it wasn't for anything related to my CKD (rather it was for my bipolar disorder) but the experience should be equally good if you qualify. They give you practically everything you need from start to finish:

- Help you pick a career path if you haven't already chosen one. (This was something I didn't utilize so I can't speak for how well it works.)
- Cover all education and training that you need (they quite literally pay for all education expenses...tuition, books, materials...hell, I had a class that specified that it required a webcam in the syllabus, so they paid for me to buy a webcam.)
- Counseling, therapy, etc, if you need it to help along the way.
- Provide job placement assistance, top to bottom. That includes things like buying your interview and work clothes, doing mock interviews, and having a personal assistant to help connect you with headhunters. (I started to use this service but ended up finding my own job anyways -- something I strangely never managed to do before beginning this program.)

[Charlie B53]

I've had the paperwork completed for two months but the Lady is only at this local office a couple of times a month.  So far I've had Dr appts and lastly a week in the hospital.  Hope to ctch up with her soon.

She is telling me of a company that actually has a work from home Customer Service, Troubleshooting installations using my PC with two monitors.  The only problem I have with that is they require Win 7 or newer.  From what I've seen with Son's computers I don't like 7, 8, or 10.  I have XP on all four of mine.  They always work just fine.

I find out eventually.  Just not today.

[Simon Dog]

Jet Blue reservations agents work out of their homes.

Many NxStage customer support people work out of their homes, though I believe that is a grandfathered arrangement and new customer service reps work from the corporate HQ in the DPRM.

[Michael Murphy]

My last job was providing support a a major government unit.  I was one of 6 people who worked on site the rest of the group over 80 people worked from home all over the US.  Fun work but when I started dialysis I realized that this work could be done while doing in center hemo.  The technology is there to support  vpn access to supply a secure internet connection.  I tried it and established a secure vpn connection from the center I use.  If that didn't work I could have used a cellular mifi connection.  I would think IT work would be perfect for a dialysis patient. 

[Charlie B53]

Remote IT would be good.  I am very good at finding the cause of problems.  IT though while not my major, I can learn pretty quickly.  My largest problem is I never took the time to learn programming languages other than the old DOS, nasic and VB, Registry I'm good.  So I would expect to need a large amount of study before I could even begin to be useful.

[Michael Murphy]

Coding is much easier today with all the java derivatives making coding much easier.