Aged care worker says opportunity matters more than perfect English

Vivienne didn’t set out to become an aged care worker. In Colombia, she trained as a nurse and worked across hospitals, clinics and emergency departments, handling everything from surgical support to medication administration.

Three years ago, she arrived in Australia – following family already here, and a partner starting his own degree – with a general English course and no fixed plan for what came next.

Care work found her almost by accident

A woman named Penny, needing support at home, gave Vivienne her first opportunity in the industry. What began as a casual arrangement became something closer to family.

“She was really, really good with me,” Vivienne says. “We also became friends.”

That relationship – carer and client, then friend – set the tone for how Vivienne thinks about the work itself. She now works as a residential care support worker, and says the pull toward elderly people isn’t incidental. She grew up close to her grandmother, and something about that bond has carried through into her career.

“I feel most comfortable with elderly people. I feel really empathetic with them.”

But it hasn’t been a smooth transition

The clinical scope she was used to in Colombia – where, as she describes it, nurses and assistants alike were expected to “do everything” – doesn’t translate directly to the more delineated roles in the Australian system. 

“Here, it’s more about rules. The nurse can do this, but this is for the doctor.” Vivienne says she didn’t find the shift itself difficult so much as she found the language demands hard, particularly in the early days.

That difficulty didn’t come without cost

Vivienne says her English was a source of real anxiety when she started as a support worker – enough that she doubted whether she could do the job at all. She’s since found the opposite is true: colleagues seek her out for help, residents respond to her, and the language barrier has mattered far less than she initially feared.

It’s a point she returns to when asked what she’d want people higher up the chain – the managers, the executives who don’t work the floor – to understand about the industry.

“Give opportunities to people from different cultures,” she says. “Sometimes I have friends with a lot of experience, but a manager says, ‘You’re not speaking well enough, so go away.’ It’s important to have good communication – but the people themselves can be really, really good. If managers give the opportunity, they’ll find good people.”

The work isn’t without its harder edges

Residents can be difficult, Vivienne says – impatient, sometimes rude – and she describes a mindset she’s had to adopt to work through it: patience, and a level of empathy she extends deliberately, even when it isn’t returned in the moment. 

But she pushes back on any assumption that the job leaves her depleted.

“When my day finishes, I think: today I did something good – for my life, for other people. I feel really fulfilled.”

Aged care perceptions can be damaging or encouraging

Her advice to anyone considering the industry, particularly those coming to it later or from somewhere else entirely, is blunt and unadorned: if you’re comfortable with people, and you want to help, just do it. 

She speaks from experience: her own hesitation, rooted in self-doubt about her English, nearly kept her from a career she now describes without qualification as one she loves.

“Doesn’t matter the language, doesn’t matter if you can’t speak perfectly. The important thing is: if you want to do it, just do it.”

Vivienne’s story might feel like an outlier in the face of endless scrutiny and horror stories from the sector, but it’s proof that there’s still a lot of good out there.