Workplace Accommodations: High Cost, Low Impact
In an effort to separate fact from fiction, the Job Accommodation Network (JAN), a service of the US Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, is going beyond the anecdotal information and is more rigorously assessing the costs and benefits to employers of providing accommodations. What does it really cost to provide accommodations for job applicants and employees with disabilities? 

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Universal Access and Customer Service
By Tammara Geary
Good customer service is essential to a business of any type, and it is a cornerstone of Universal Access. These are principles that every employment consultant who represents people with disabilities should know. Universal Access is...

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Big Sign Syndrome: The Job Developer’s Small Business Advantage
By Cary Griffin and Dave Hammis, Griffin-Hammis Associates
• Consider Klements Lane in Florence, Montana, where Cary lives. Florence has about 1,000 residents and we live outside the town center on a two mile long road with 24 mailboxes. On this road are at least 11 families supported by their small businesses. None of these enterprises is identified by a sign. Now, this circumstance is certainly a ringing endorsement for the power of business enterprise in rural areas, but more than that, it should be a source of wonder and optimism for Employment Specialists and Job Developers everywhere...

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Career Planning - Building Solid Employment
By Cary Griffin and Dave Hammis, Griffin-Hammis Associates
• When you decided on a college major, did you check the latest market surveys for the top jobs? Probably not. Most Americans, not all but most, chose majors that fit their personalities, their dreams, and the subjects they got the best grades in in high school. However, traditional job development for people with disabilities has been based on the market demand principle. That approach is fading because, after over 50 years of trying to fit people with disabilities into jobs that an interest inventory or vocational assessment pinpointed, or that a labor demand survey emphasized, job retention remains extremely lows...

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Paid Work or a Volunteer: Guidelines for Determining
By Dale DiLeo
• When should job trainees with disabilities be paid and when can they volunteer their work to gain job experience? The Fair Labor Standards Act, administered by the US Department of Labor, has criteria established in Supreme Court cases to distinguish non-paid instructional work experiences from paid employment. Transition specialists and SE professionals involved in developing jobs for students with disabilities must understand this distinction to prevent providing employment-related instruction without pay when payment may be required...

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Informed Choice and Decision Making
By Tammara Geary
Historically, people with disabilities have not been afforded the opportunity to make choices. They are often presented with only one option, that being whatever the provider of services has determined to be the appropriate one, or simply the one they offer. Further, there has been an apparent belief that people with disabilities are not capable of making decisions. This seems to be more prevalent when referring to people with cognitive disabilities.  All too often, people and programs behave as though having a disability means a person cannot make decisions. This is simply not true...

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Connections: Building Capacity by Maximizing Opportunities
By Roger Shelley
In most communities, employment consultants cannot sit back and wait for opportunity to come knocking on their doors – they have to knock on their neighbors’ doors and see if opportunity is living there. The consultant’s ability to increase the employment capacity of the community members, employers and the people whom they serve depends on finding employment opportunities in unlikely places. When the consultant can find and take advantage of these opportunities, everyone benefits.

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Informing Strategies for Training Job-Related Tasks
By Ellen Condon, David Hammis & Cary Griffin
There are various ways of providing information to learners and each person will respond differently to certain cues. For example, a person who has a hearing impairment will learn best if more visual cues are used than relying solely on verbal instructions. Although trainers need to use prompts or cues to teach students new skills they need to start planning how to remove those cues from day one to maximize the learner’s independence and minimize their dependence on the trainer.

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