Caroline Austin
My name's Caroline Austin. I am 32 and I am registered blind. I have Glaucoma. I'mcompletely blind in my right eye and I don't have great vision in my left eye. My current role is Senior Conference and Events Sales Coordinator. I currently look after both Holiday Inns in Edinburgh. My main role is to organise conferences, weddings, parties, and just coordinate those for clients, take calls, deal with contracts and invoicing, billing, doshow round for both properties and just coordinate the event from start to finish really.
I love the wedding part of my job. It's very hands on. You get to know the people and you're kind of with them right from the start of their journey right through to the actual wedding day. That is the best part of my job - doing the weddings and the parties and that kind of thing. It's just meeting the people and just kind of doing something that I never really thought that I'd actually be able to do before, so yeah just doing that.
When I initially started I started as part time. I was just out of college. I finished college in the June and I came straight to the Holiday Inn as a part time salesadministrator's job. I thought"well you know it's a foot in the door, I'm going to try it"so went for that part time and then eventuallyover the years became full time and moved then to conference more full time as well as conference and events. I've been doing that probably seven or eight years and then over the past maybe three or four years got promoted into the senior position.
My eye sight'sdefinitely not stopped me from following my career and getting promoted. The government scheme that I found when I initially started at Holiday Inn was the Access to Work scheme, and they came and they did an assessment to see what kind of things I would need because when I first started I didn't have any equipment at all. I knew about magnification you could get for the computer but they opened my eyes up to so much more information that I could get and they helped me get magnification software for my computer. They helped me get a little magnifier that could help me write and then a little magnifier that I could take aroundwith me to meetings and things, so they completely opened my eyes up as I never knew you could get any of that kind of stuff so they were brilliant and they got all of that stuff for me.
The advice that I would give to people that have perhaps lost their sight or are looking for work: what I did, the only way I could convince employers to employ me was to actually have the knowledge myself. So when I was at college, and prior to that, I did quite a lot of voluntary work just to try and see where your sortof strength areand your weaknesses and then at least if you know what your strengths and weaknesses are you're able to convince the employer what your strengths and weaknesses are, and if you know you can do that job then I don't see why you can't convince them that you can do that job - that'sexactly what I did.