Charlie Matthews

00:15

S1 (Speaker 1)

On Vision Australia Radio, this is Vision Extra with Peter Greco.

S2

We're going to speak about the Career Visions program, Vision Australia and someone taking part in it is Charlie Matthews. Charlie, great to meet you. Thanks for your time.

S3

It's great to meet you too. Thank you for having me on this.

S2

What made you decide to join the Career Visions program?

S3

Well, had a few. Not necessarily bad, but a few experiences trying to get jobs where I felt as if I didn't really know what I was doing or what was available to me out there. I connected with Mark Wilkie, one of the employment consultants here, and after a couple months of working with him, he suggested to me that I join this program since it was about to start.

S2

It's an eight week program and you're getting towards the end of it. Tell us a bit about the program. What sort of things have you done and what have you got out of it so far?

S3

Oh, personally, I feel like I've got a lot out of it. What we've done is mainly administration work. Finding out what we would like to do as work has been a major part of it. We've had talks from quite a few different people, from a few MPs, from a few technology people as well as that we've had a lot of help with assistive technology. Like I said at the start of this, I use a screen reader now and I've actually started training on how to use it. It's not something I ever thought would happen. 

S2

Tell us a bit about your sight situation, if you're happy to share that, because I guess there's no good age or, you know, the right age to be diagnosed with the vision impairment. But you know, I guess when you got the news, it was sort of at a time in your life when you probably would rather be doing other things.

S3

Oh, absolutely. But don't mind talking about it. I'm pretty open. My brother has the same condition. Still got macular dystrophy. He was diagnosed roughly ten years ago, so it was a lot earlier than my symptoms even started. I'm coming up on my 21st birthday and I was around my 16th birthday when I had an appointment with an optometrist because I was struggling to see the board at school. She's the same lady who realised there was something wrong with my brother's eyes. So she zoomed in on one of the photos that she took and noticed something was a little bit off. It wasn't what it was supposed to look like. So she referred me to a specialist in Mackay who, after I saw him a few times, basically said he believes I have the same condition as my brother.

S2

Has that been a good thing or a bad thing? Kind of. You know, knowing what your brother's going through is more than likely something you're going to be going through in, you know, not not too distant future.

S3

Well, it's been a bit mixed, really. It's been very relieving having someone in my life who's going through it and is able to help me and sort of guide me guess. But at the same time, it's quite scary.

S2

You say you've learnt to use a screen reader, so tell us a bit about your site situation. How much do you have and what about in terms of orientation and mobility, that sort of thing?

S3

I don't have central vision, or at least it's very, very bad. I don't know if anyone would understand this, but I did a central field of view test which measures about 10%, and I got roughly 4% left or so. I struggle to see fine detail because Central is all the very acute small things such as reading the letters on the keys of the laptop or reading where I'm pretty sure my name is supposed to be on the screen. I can have a little bit of trouble identifying people who are walking up to me or walking past me. I actually find it really useful when people like say their name as they come up to me to start talking. Otherwise I'm sitting there like, Yes, I know you, but where? Yeah.

S2

What about during the during the course or during the week time with the career visions? I'm assuming you're meeting other people, not necessarily the same sort of eye condition, but you know, who have been through some challenging times and wanting to sort of get a break as far as their career goes.

S3

It's honestly been amazing. It's given me the sense of community and the sense of I'm not alone that was really needing.

04:55

S2

Have you got some idea as to what you want to do? Because I often say to people, sometimes it's really good if you know what you don't want to do because you can kind of cross that off and move on to the next. Thing I do. You know what you don't want to do? And B, do you know what you want to do? Or maybe the other way around? I guess I should ask. Yeah.

S3

I know for a fact I don't want to deal with money like physically handling it, but what I do want to do is a little bit out there. I've got a deep fascination with space astronomy, astrophysics and Astrophotography.

S2

Where did that come from?

S3

Honestly, I'm not too sure. I know that as a kid I loved just, you know, sneaking outside in the middle of the night, laying on the grass and looking at the sky. Yeah, but it was never something I ever considered as a kid. I never really thought about being an astronaut or being a scientist or any of that much.

S2

Well, of course. Well, I mean, the space sort of industry has been around for a long, long time. You know, Man land on the moon in 1969. And there was stuff going on before then. But there's a lot more emphasis now on space research and sort of things that we can learn from it as far as our future goes. So in terms of employment opportunities, I'd say there'd be a lot that could open up or that are opening up.

S3

Absolutely. Prior to it was a relatively small field and it's been booming with all of the discoveries that have been made.

S2

Yeah. Are you also interested in childcare or have you worked a little bit in childcare?

S3

I have worked in it, yeah. It's something that for quite a while I was very intent on doing as a career one day running my own childcare center, but I'm not too sure when or why. One day I sort of just woke up and went, Does this make me as happy as I can be?

S2

And that's important, isn't it? Because it's not just the money, but it's, I guess, the fulfillment of what you do that is really, really important.

S3

Absolutely.

S2

Just some of the components of career visions. What sort of things have you been doing, I guess, in the practical sense or sort of day to day stuff? Because it's eight weeks, so it's fairly intense, I would imagine.

S3

Yeah, it has been pretty intense. We've done a lot of sort of admin work like training in how to use Word Excel, all of that in a way that's actually efficient. And so we know what we're doing and how to do what we need to do. I've been creating a little shortcut, I guess, master list to help everyone out with that because using the keyboard is quite easy. With Jaws, we've done a few little workshops about what's to be expected in the workplace, such as how we want to be treated by an employer and what we can do if we feel we're not being treated right. We've had a few workshops on, well, what we want to do really, and things that may help us figure that out.

S2

I know you've got a sort of finishing function coming up on the 30th of June. How do you know what's involved with that? And then do you know what will come after that? Have you kind of got any ideas as to what might happen when the kind of eight weeks is up?

S3

Well, I'm pretty involved with it, all of the training, organising. So I guess our bosses don't really have much to do with the organisation. They've asked us to do all of it. That's contacting everyone, organizing the room for the day, organising, catering. It's essentially going to be a little morning tea on the 30th where we get to invite everyone who funds or supports this program. We get to talk to them about what it's done for us, about where we're hoping to go in our lives afterwards. I believe that there's quite a few of the higher ups in Vision Australia might be going, which has me a little nervous. I'll be honest.

S2

You'll be fine, Charlie. Tell me you've been on the radio. Might you will actually, in all seriousness. So the fact that, you know, you're going to be meeting with some of the people that have been supporting it and then talk about what you've got out of it, I mean, hopefully they're impressed and then they continue to support it. So another group of cohorts can come through and get the same benefit from it.

S3

I really hope so. This program has honestly, it's done a lot for me. It's probably changed my life a bit because before I came into this I was quite depressed. I was doing nothing and now I feel like I have a purpose. I have some sort of direction and I have a community behind me.

S2

It's a very powerful message, isn't it?

S3

Yeah. So if I can do anything that will help this program run and will help it be funded, then I'm definitely going to do it.

10:00

S2

I know it's a little bit off topic, but you know, often when we hear the unemployment figures released and 3.6% unemployed, you know, virtually full employment. I find that frustrating because I know people, particularly with disabilities, but people in general that can't find work and they're trying as hard as they might. So I'm not sure that those figures that are totally accurate in terms of really being representative. How difficult it is for people to get to employment and maybe we sort of touched on getting fulfilling employment as well rather than just doing something because there's a job out there because they want to answer money but actually doing something that's meaningful to them.

S3

Yeah, it's likely it's quite skewed. I know one of the other trainees has applied for probably over 300, 400 jobs in the last year or so and heard nothing back. And I know from my own personal experience that you can be applying all day, every day and you won't get much as a result because...

S2

At least you'd like to know why you didn't get the job. Then you've got something to work on. I mean, hearing nothing is. I mean, that's sort of no news is terrible news, isn't it, really? If you don't know what you can be doing to improve yourself, then where do you go to?

S3

Yeah, it's quite disheartening. It makes you not want to bother with it anymore. Something that's been really great about this program is, for example, having about 4 or 5 different people look over my resume for me and help me with it.

S2

And obviously it's a much better resume than it was eight weeks ago.

S3

Oh, definitely.

S2

Which is obviously something that will be very, very important as far as future career opportunities go. Have you discussed much earlier about, you know, when in an interview process, do you let your prospective employer know that you have a vision impairment? Does that come up much in discussions?

S3

We've actually talked about that quite a bit. My personal view of it is I would prefer to tell them before I even go to the interview, if I send them an email just saying hi, confirming my interview appointment this day at this time, I would like to let you know I have low vision. If they reply, I can sort of make a quick judgment on whether or not it's a place that will be accepting of me.

S2

That's a good point, isn't it? That is a great point. I guess if they've said yes, we'd like to meet you for an interview. They're kind of been impressed up until now. So I guess then it's up to you to, during the interview, perhaps demonstrate the fact that you can do the job even. Yeah. Even though. But with the vision impairment, you can still do the job probably better than the person that might have come after you who's got the vision.

S3

Yeah, I don't put it in my resume, but if I'm tailing a cover letter, then I will be able to put the I have a visual impairment. I've built these skills as a result to help me overcome the challenges and it seems to be quite good based off of the feedback I've got.

S2

I've enjoyed talking to you. Good luck. Thank you for giving us a bit of a snapshot of what career vision is. Good luck to the next lot of intakes and I wish you well with whatever you choose to do. I'm sure you'd be a fine asset to any organisation.

S3

Thank you so much, Peter. I've really enjoyed talking to you and I hope I get to talk to you again.

S4

Well, it's a it's a date.

S3

Fantastic.

13:26

S2

That's Charlie Matthews. They're one of the participants in Australia's Career Visions program. That is it for the program. If you've missed some of them, if you'd like to hear it again, you can search for an extra on the iTunes store on Spotify or your favorite podcast service.