Building skills for your transition

Introduction

Investing effort into learning new things and building confidence prior to any move taking place can deliver significant benefits, both for your initial transition and for the longer term.

This chapter aims to help prioritise the high-impact skills that will make the move possible, while also identifying opportunities for longer-term growth with things you are looking to build independence towards.

Know your minimum skill requirements

The skill-building requirements of a change in living situation can be overwhelming. So, it is important to remember that you don’t need to know how to do everything to be able to move into a more independent living environment. It is common for people to move out of home with limited cooking skills, not feeling confident managing a budget or needing regular check-ins about their overall wellbeing.

Breaking things down into what will make the move possible (even just initially) versus what will make it sustainable can help to create a list of minimum requirements alongside longer-term skill building. This can be used to prioritise your efforts in the lead-up to your move.

For example, if cooking skills are something that need to be developed, it would be great to have the ability to make 30 recipes. But being able to reheat a meal that was prepared with help earlier in the week might also be a perfectly workable scenario to focus on as a minimum requirement.

Minimum skill requirement: skills that need to be in place to make the move possible

Longer-term skill building: skills that will make the new living situation sustainable

It is also important to note that not every task needs a long-term learning goal associated with it. In some instances, the ‘minimum requirement’ will be entirely sustainable, providing that works for you. Long-term skill building is relevant when it applies to something you are trying to build independence towards.

High-impact skill-building

When time is on your side, investing effort into building skills and confidence prior to a change in living situation will always be worthwhile. However, sometimes you may find you need to move with limited lead-in time.

In these situations, it can be useful to focus your time and energy on the things that will have the greatest impact. These will often be ones that relate to risk or that give you a significant boost in your independence.

For example, if you can be at home by yourself for significant parts of your day, but have no way to call for help if you might need it, learning how to make a phone call, send a text or reach out to your neighbours could make a significant difference. You do not have to learn how to communicate in all of these ways initially, just select one specific skill that can meet the need. This could be a strategy like making a code with your family to send a certain emoji when you need someone to check in with you.

It can be useful to ask yourself: how much work would it take to build this skill (effort), compared to how useful would it be to be able to do that task (impact)? The short-term priority matrix, pictured below, can be a helpful tool for this exercise.

Short-term priority matrix with three rows and three columns. Impact increases from bottom to top, effort increases from left to right. Cells are labeled by priority level. Top-left cell is ‘Highest Priority’ for high impact, low effort. Bottom-right cell is ‘Lowest Priority’ for low impact, high effort. — A short-term priority matrix can be a useful tool when deciding where to focus your skill-building efforts in the lead-up to a change in living situation.

Technology and tools

Technology can play a significant role in supporting skill-building, particularly for tasks that are repetitive and need regular prompting, or that relate to your ability to feel secure in your home and get help when needed. (For more information on this, see Exploring technology for your independence – Stage 2, Chapter 8.) It can also be useful to utilise tools such as a checklist or visual aid, to help build independence with regular tasks.

Managing roadblocks

If there are skills you don’t have that are going to get in the way of you making this move, it is important that you consider other ways that each task can be achieved. For example:

cooking in bulk so that you don’t have to make meals from scratch every day

hiring a cleaner if you haven’t mastered keeping the house clean yet

using technology to support you to feel safe and get help when needed

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Where to start

Conduct a skill review

A skill review is a good first step if you want to figure out which skills to work on before you move. This means knowing what you can already do, what you still need to learn, and what matters most for your new home.

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Next steps

Read through the example scenarios below

Use the worksheet below to figure out which skills you want to focus on before you change your living situation

Scenarios

Sunil

Sunil uses Smart Home Assistants (like Alexa or Google Home) to prompt him to follow his routine. While they aren’t as flexible as it was when his mum could prompt him, they are able to provide verbal instructions to remind him to complete a task.

Hone

Hone has built a great relationship with his two nearest neighbours. Their numbers are in his favourites list in his phone, alongside his whānau, so he can text them if there is something more urgent he needs support with, rather than waiting for his whānau to arrive. He texted them when his power went off after he tripped the circuit breaker using too many appliances at the same time.

Alex

Alex likes to cook and can already cook spaghetti bolognaise. They are practicing making other things with the mince sauce, like lasagne and nachos. They are finding it is easier to learn variations that allow them to have a wider range of meals from the same basic ingredients that they are confident with using.