Jinan, a mother to three children recently moved to Britain and wanted to continue with her teaching career. She was referred to GRoW through her Work Coach.
Jinan said “Before I came to Britain I had been working for 8 years and it had become an important part of my life. I was missing the routine that work had given me and it was not good for my mental health. I needed to be out and in a working community again. I’d been looking for work for a few months and was trying to become a Teaching Assistant but I wasn’t having much success. I was getting to be in a bad place, feeling sorry for myself rather than being proactive.
I had been teaching English in Saudi Arabia and have a Batchelors degree in IT but as I had never worked in the UK before I wasn’t sure whether my credentials would be recognised here. I went to the Job Centre and explained my situation to my Work Coach and she referred me to the GRoW Programme for support and to help me with my CV.
GRoW really helped me out of that negative space. I saw Liz soon after the summer holidays and I started going along to the sessions to help build my confidence and to learn about how to do my CV and prepare for interviews, I found it all highly useful. I found my confidence was really improving, it had gone from zero to really quite high after those sessions. It was great to see how the other ladies on the programme were going through similar situations to what I was going through and although we all had our own circumstances we were all trying to achieve things for ourselves; it helped me feel like I wasn’t so alone.
The sessions were really good and as well as the confidence building I learned some very important tips for my cv with specific points as to what I really had to do in order to get a job such as finding key words in the Job Descriptions and tailoring my cv to suit the job I was applying for. The session on preparing for interviews gave us advice on what type of questions to expect and preparing my confidence level.
After I completed the sessions I started to look for a job through the GRoW weekly Jobs Bulletin. I registered on the Crinkle website that specialises in working in schools. As I have three children I really needed a job to work around school hours. I started applying and found a job at a local primary school. They asked me to come for an interview and I prepared myself using all of the advice and guidance I’d received from GRoW. The interview went very well and they offered me the position of a Part-time Teaching Assistant. They were willing to give me flexible hours which meant I could pick up my youngest from Nursery and they will be training me to start work in December.
I am doing a Masters Degree at the moment which finishes in February and I really want to try to achieve teaching qualifications here in the UK. I so appreciate everything the GRoW Programme has done for me. I feel like a different person from when I started and now have a completely different perspective.