EVOLVE Business and Professional Magazine February 2020 | Page 27

her house, the specialist asked, “Oh,
are you an OT?”
“And I said, ‘What’s that?’”
Occupational Therapy, like the
of a team that tracks how much progress patients make during
their rehabilitation stays.
She says she enjoys the teamwork and variety her new
closely related Physical Therapy, position offers. “My ultimate goal is to help people,” Gilmore
are limited by illness or accident to heart comes from OT.”
includes helping clients whose abilities
Desirae Gilmore
documents to meet Medicare requirements and also serves as part
learn work-arounds, so they can still
do the things they love. To work in
this field requires creativity, patience—and two years of specific
classroom and field training, followed by a national certification
exam.
Gilmore, who had returned to school to earn a business-
related degree, switched gears and completed Daytona State
College’s Occupational Therapy Assistant program. She sailed
through the certification and licensing processes, and then started
says. “The analytical part of my job comes from banking, and the
Whether you need to make the leap into entrepreneurship,
return to school, or find a spot that synthesizes everything you’ve
learned in life … a new career might be just the ticket to your
own Second Act.
Did you know?
According to a 2011 MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures study, as many
as 9 million people between ages 44 and 70 are already in “encore”
careers that combine, in varying proportions, purpose, passion and a
paycheck – and another 31 million are interested in joining them.
working as an occupational therapy assistant at Halifax Health/
Brooks Rehabilitation Center for Inpatient Rehabilitation.
But then the hospital gave her an opportunity that would
merge both her skill sets, using the attention to detail she
had acquired in banking and the insights she’d gleaned from
occupational therapy training. She became the rehabilitation
Kimberley Jace is a freelance writer and editor with
more than thirty years of print journalism and book
editing experience.
facility’s coordinator for inpatient assessments. Now she reviews
FEBRUARY 2020 | 21 |