If you’ve recently had a scroll through Seek, you’d probably think it’s pretty easy to find a job as an OT right now. And in some ways, you’re right – there are plenty of jobs to choose from. But now the problem is finding the RIGHT OT job.

When you’re choosing a job, you have to weigh up lots of factors – location, salary, career progression opportunities, team structure and more. These things are important, but in this article I wanted to highlight three other things that can get overlooked – the setting, the team and the client journey.

Have a read through Tom’s story and see if you agree…

Tom’s Story*

I met Tom in an online supervision session on Zoom. He had sought me out as an external supervisor because he was finding it tough settling into this first role as a new grad OT. When he left university, he new he wanted to work with older people, so some helpful people told him all about hospital OT roles, and how they are a great way to receive excellent support and build up some competency and confidence quickly.

And he was lucky enough to find a Level 1/2 OT role in a hospital setting. He’d had a student placement in a similar ward before and he got through that one OK, so on paper it seemed to be an excellent choice.

But a few months in he was reaching out because he wasn’t enjoying the work. He constantly felt like he wasn’t doing enough for his patients, so he assumed it must be his own poor time management or lack of clinical knowledge. He felt drained by the end of the day and found himself sitting quietly in the ward team room each afternoon trying to write up all his progress notes for the day, because he just couldn’t seem to focus and write them while up on the ward like all the other OTs. And while he turned up to supervision sessions, he seemed to leave them feeling more confused than before he arrived.

After a bit of unpacking, we found out it probably wasn’t that Tom’s skills and effort were the problem, it was that he was actually in a role that wasn’t the best fit. The setting, team support and values, and the patient journey he was actually able to assist his clients with, weren’t right for him.

The Setting

When you think about a hospital ward, what do you think of? I’m guessing busy, rushing people, noisy alarms and bells, and lots of smells (not all of them pleasant). When we discussed what type of setting Tom used to like for when he was doing focused work as a uni student, it wasn’t sitting with his mates at the uni café. It wasn’t with a loud TV on in the background. It was sitting in a quiet space in his room with noise cancelling headphones on so that he didn’t get distracted. No wonder he couldn’t write his notes while standing at a busy nurse’s station on the ward. His brain didn’t work like that.

And while there could be things he could change to make it easier (like using his headphones or stealing a small section of the doctors office when it was empty), the busy over-stimulating environment could never be eliminated in an inpatient hospital role.

This is why it is important to consider what type of environment allows you to do your best work; is it somewhere quiet where you can work without interruptions, or do you need people around you and a bit of noise. The flip side could be what if you loved having noise and conversations to do your best work. Signing up for a community-based role where everyone works from a home office, you spend long hours alone on the road, and the only conversations you have need to be booked in advance, probably wouldn’t be fun for you. But it could be the perfect option for Tom.

The Team

OT jobs are tough at the moment, whether you work in public health in a hospital, or a community-based NDIS role in the private sector. Even if you are someone that likes serenity, quiet and working in a self-directed way, you still need good support. And it needs to be support that is the right fit for you.

It could be that there are things you can improve, such as being proactive in supervision and coming prepared with an agenda and some of your own reflections and ideas about how you can improve (Tom and I discussed some tips for this). But you should also think about what sort of team support you need outside of direct supervision, and this often comes down to the values of your team and how they align with your own.

Tom was someone who valued learning and was a proud #OTNerd who loved reading clinical practice guidelines and going along to the free lunch-time presentations run by the hospital, even if it meant he had to stay back a little later after finish time to get through all his work.

But the majority of the OT team didn’t have this same value. Their priority was doing work quickly and efficiently so they could finish on time, and if learning didn’t fit into those work hours, it didn’t happen that day. Now there’s nothing wrong with this, and I’m not saying someone’s values are ‘better’ than another’s, but they just didn’t align. Instead of feeling enthusiastic about sharing what he had learnt, he felt he had to keep it to himself. He felt he had to hide a part of himself that he valued.

The Client Journey

As an OT who worked in a hospital for a decade, mostly in acute wards or outpatient clinics, and then moved to a community role, I have seen that there is such a difference in what we can achieve with clients in different settings.

Hospitals are busy and fast-paced, with the focus on getting people out of hospital and home as soon as they’re close enough to be considered ‘safe’. You can get really good at doing comprehensive assessments quickly, but you learn to target those assessments to what is within your scope in that setting. So, while you’d love to help your patients brainstorm ways to get back to doing their favourite hobby or start an upper limb program to address some difficulties they’ve been experiencing due to hand arthritis, there just isn’t time for you to do this. You need to refer it on to another OT.

Hospital roles are great if you like making quick assessments and recommendations then moving onto helping the next client, but what if you’re an OT who loves doing the other stuff – helping with leisure activities, or addressing chronic health conditions that can’t be solved with a one-off information handout. You’re going to find the restricted scope of a hospital OT very frustrating.

You’ll feel like you aren’t doing enough for your client, even though you were doing plenty for what the setting allowed you to do. This was Tom. He was a community-based or slow-stream rehab OT trapped in an acute OT role. It wasn’t his lack of prioritisation or time management, it just wasn’t the right fit.

After our discussion, Tom didn’t leave with a list full of answers to his prioritisation and time management difficulties, which was what his original agenda was. Instead, he left with a plan to start exploring what other OT roles were out there, knowing that just because his first role didn’t go to plan, it didn’t mean he wasn’t meant to be an OT. He just needed to spend a little more time looking for the right fit.

Hopefully this article has given you some extra things to think about the next time you’re choosing a job. Definitely consider the salary, KPIs and perks, but think deeply about the other things too – the setting, the team and the client journey – and I think you’ll be on your way to finding the RIGHT OT job for you.

P.S. If you’d like a step-by-step approach to guide your reflections and decision-making when it comes to choosing a job, you may want to check out my free workbook and webinar: “Choosing the RIGHT Job for Me”

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*some details changed to maintain anonymity