After recently giving notice at the company where I have worked for almost 10 years, I was disturbed to hear about a comment made in passing by another manager.
Valerie S, a 2008 SAMFund alum and Alumni Leadership Council member, provides her perspective on what her cancer experience brings to her professional career.
After recently giving notice at the company where I have worked for almost 10 years, I was disturbed to hear about a comment made in passing by another manager. Apparently,this colleague was surprised that I hadn’t had a more difficult time finding a new job because of my “medical issues.” This commentary, tinged with concern at best, and condescending and insulting at worst, gave me food for thought.
How do we, as survivors, overcome the potential and sometimes very real challenges, setbacks, and negative connotations of our illnesses in our professional lives, and in particular, during the job search process?
Many survivors choose to not talk about their past illness or ongoing health issues due to the hiring fears this may bring up… What if they discriminate against me because I had cancer? What if they don’t choose me because they think I can’t hack it? Unfortunately, I did not have the luxury of avoiding my past illness for two reasons. First, due to my outspoken involvement in the survivor and bone marrow transplant community, a Google search of my name easily turns up hits related to my illness. Second, my motivation for getting into healthcare was largely because of my experience as a patient. So I had to be very strategic about how I presented and “used” my illness to, in effect, sell myself.
It was very easy to become overwhelmed and assume I would be passed over for someone else without a cancer-type history. But surprisingly, what I found is that many of the key things that appealed to my new employer stemmed directly from my experience as a patient. By no means do I claim to be an expert in career coaching nor do I believe these lessons or qualities to be at all unique to survivors. I can only speak from experience; in my case, these eight lessons helped formulate my value proposition as an employee, allowing me to turn my illness from a liability into a very powerful and useful tool in the job search arsenal.
It is my strongly held belief that whatever I may lack in perfect health is more than made up for in the array of qualities I now bring to the table. Without even realizing it, the key tenets of what made me someone worth hiring were built up over the years of fighting for my health and then continuing to manage my health. These lessons, powerful and deeply embedded in my professional and personal psyche, came across to the hiring manager as real, valuable, and transferable… and led to those two magical words, “You’re hired.”
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