Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation

Locally-based and collaborative interagency transition teams have long been considered to be a “best practice” in the delivery of high school-to-adult life transition services for young adults with disabilities. Nevertheless, very little research exists assessing the specific team development and collaboration activities that these teams undertake in their efforts to improve outcomes for youth residing in their communities. As a result, although we believe local interagency teams are an effective vehicle for planning and delivering transition services, we know very little about the specific characteristics and activities of these teams. This is problematic for technical assistance (TA) providers, as well as for local team leaders, as we have limited guidance to offer teams in their initiation and membership struggles, goal setting and attainment activities, action planning models, or processes for reaching consensus. We have even less guidance to offer teams for their specific collaborative and interagency activities such as evaluating the viability of interagency agreements, the impact of joint personnel and service funding, or guidelines for making policy and procedural revisions.

The purpose of this report is to explore these issues with local interagency teams in South Carolina by summarizing self-reported data on team development and collaboration interagency activities from 22 local interagency teams followed by the Transition Alliance of South Carolina (TASC) between September 2015 and September 2016. This report will also suggest TA activities for providers to focus upon as well as team leadership activities for local team leaders to use to initiate and lead teams in their local communities.

There is a paucity of research regarding employment services for adults with autism. Interventions typically focus on adapting behaviors of the person rather than customized approaches and environmental adaptations that may improve employment matching and ongoing, competitive employment rates.

The ACCESS intervention protocolizes the customized employment (CE) process and has the potential to optimize employment outcomes in adults with autism. Lessons learned during the implementation of the Phase I open trial are presented.

The study utilizes a randomized pre-test post-test experimental control group design. Phase I - open trial (N = 10) of the study tested feasibility and acceptability of the ACCESS intervention. Phase II - randomized controlled trial (N = 30) will test preliminary efficacy of an amended intervention protocol.

Findings from the open trial suggest the need for a revised recruitment strategy and an extended timeframe for the intervention. Thorough screening of practitioners and assessing participants’ work motivation may reduce attrition.

An evidence-based, user-friendly process that employs well-trained practitioners is critical to successful implementation of CE services with fidelity and consistency. A collaborative approach to training, implementation, documentation, evaluation, and pre and post-employment supports is essential to promote an effective and sustainable intervention.

The continued advancement of Employment First requires, in part, a strong understanding about our existing policies and practices and how effective systems are as they undergo changes. Data about the employment of people with disabilities and about employment support systems are a critical component to this advancement.

This paper presents an overview of the current national context as it relates to the employment of people with disabilities.

Next a discussion about the importance of employment data and key data-centric opportunities for the field are presented. A summary of important data innovations occurring nationally are offered to highlight opportunities that may exist in other states. Finally, the authors present a brief discussion on how to advance the field’s use of these critical data.

The transition of sheltered workshops or Australian Disability Enterprises (ADE) as they are known in Australia, to open employment settings unlike the USA lacks the legislative driver to encourage providers to move towards the promotion of integrated employment in the community. As a result, we have witnessed a move to rebadge ADE’s as social enterprises in order to change public perceptions, without changes in wage outcomes or pathways to real work in the community. ADE’s in Australia present as something of a challenge for government in trying to balance the competing provider agenda, against its obligations to people with a disability underpinned by the Disability Services Act (1986), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with a Disability and the establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

This paper will examine the policy drivers for change and findings from work undertaken by the Centre for Disability Employment Research and Practice (CDERP) to promote provider transformation to integrated employment settings and the issues experienced in provider transformation within these policy settings.

Education, ongoing support for employment staff and families, along with community partnerships are seen as ingredients for creating provider transformation and meaningful employment outcomes.

Employment specialists have the power to facilitate and change the course of a person’s life. Challenged with juggling sizeable caseloads, changing schedules, administrative tasks, and implementing a diverse set of skills and competencies, it can be difficult for the professional to provide the best supports for each supported employee. In an attempt to bridge the gap between research and practice, this article presents accessible, easily understood concepts to consider when facilitating positive outcomes for supported employees.

Identify relatable, teachable, and usable concepts that guide employment specialist actions for optimal outcomes.

Strategies, interventions, and competencies were compiled for employment specialists to consider when supporting a job seeker to secure employment. Guidelines were identified through research and experience in the field.

Best practices are presented in four ‘rules’ to guide employment specialists and managers in evaluating and monitoring their actions while working with supported employees.

Employment specialists may use these relatable ‘rules’ to evaluate their actions and incorporate best practices that support optimal outcomes.

This paper uses follow-up case studies of two youths who completed the Post-Secondary Apprenticeship for Youth with disabilities (PAY Check) program to chronicle outcomes and lessons learned.

The article concludes with recommendations for improving transition programs designed to promote full participation of youth with disabilities in the community as adults.

Assisting individuals with disabilities as they navigate social expectations at the workplace is always a challenge, but when situations of a sexual nature arise, the challenge becomes more complex. By reviewing the literature regarding sexuality relative to individuals with disabilities and examining common interventions for social/emotional challenges in the workplace, this article explores what employment specialists can do to support individuals with disabilities when these issues intersect on the job.

This article outlines the social and educational context for why social/sexual issues present themselves in the workplace, why they pose a unique challenge to individuals with I/DD, and strategies employment specialists can utilize to support the healthy sexuality of the individuals they serve while assisting them in maintaining their employment.

Effective employer engagement strategies are critical to the provision of high quality employment supports for individuals with disabilities. There is a gap in both relevant research and knowledge surrounding these strategies. This article describes the knowledge translation (KT) activities of the Diversity Partners Project, which are designed to promote and contextualize a set of promising employer engagement practices to improve outcomes for job seekers with disabilities.

KT is an emerging area of study in the field of disability and employment. This article explores the role of capacity building in a knowledge translation intervention for employment service providers.

Ongoing efforts on the Diversity Partners Project have involved KT principles as an integral part of the process. The target audience of the intervention has been actively engaged in the process from development to implementation to evaluation. Overall, frontline staff have been receptive and even eager for the on-demand, business-focused tools made available to them on the website, though broad adoption has been hindered by a number of factors.

The authors continue the dialogue, initiated in 2016, discussing how disability service professionals and society at large can unintentionally create “weird” situations for people with disabilities by creating “special”— that is, segregated— activities and events for people with disabilities, rather than working to include individuals with disabilities in the activities and events that already happen in communities. The authors further explore the continuing trend of calling out and excessively celebrating people’s actions and accomplishments based solely on the fact that they experience a disability. This session shares examples of people with disabilities in the news and social media, encouraging discussion about the difference between drawing attention to events that are newsworthy because of their historical context versus those that merely reinforce disability stereotypes.

It is critical to continue challenging disability stereotypes and questioning the value of segregated, disability-specific activities that serve to exclude people with disabilities from the community at large, even as they celebrate these “special” opportunities.

In this session, a panel of individuals who experience disability shares personal experiences with this kind of “weirdness” and suggest ways to #stopmakingitweird. The authors provide ideas and discussion to encourage disability professionals, family members of people with disabilities, and people from the community at large to consider their own assumptions and stereotypes while challenging those whom they know and interact with to do the same.

Recent national and state-level policy changes have created an imperative for providers to change their organizational structures and service delivery models from providing primarily sheltered work to integrated employment. As a result, many providers have been challenged with how to transform their services in order to make this shift. Findings from a Delphi panel of experts in the field of organizational transformation revealed ten elements necessary for successful change away from segregated work options (Lyons, Timmons, Hall & Leblois, 2018).

The current manuscript extends the Delphi results through the implementation of four case studies conducted with providers serving primarily individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) that successfully transformed away from sheltered employment in the last ten years.

Findings showed a plethora of implementation strategies. This manuscript shares provider transformation approaches according to each of the ten Delphi panel elements. Considerations are offered for others seeking to evolve towards integrated employment supports for individuals with IDD.

Over the last 15 years, customization has emerged nationally as a powerful job creation strategy for a wide variety of people, including those who experience the most significant disabilities or other barriers to employment. Following the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 (WIOA), the state of Oregon partnered with the National Center on Leadership for the Employment and Economic Advancement of People with Disabilities (LEAD Center) to explore a new approach to Customized Employment (CE) called Guided Group Discovery (GGD) (2018), in which multiple systems/agencies can support youth and adults to achieve an employment outcome.

This paper explores approaches to bring Guided Group Discovery to scale through cross-system partnerships, leveraging Pre-Employment Transition Services (Pre-ETS) and funding to improve employment outcomes for youth.

During school year 2017-18, Oregon Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) and the LEAD Center created a partnership to modify and implement the LEAD Center’s Guided Group Discovery curriculum, with support from six school districts, to make it more accessible to youth with disabilities that were benefiting from their Pre-Employment Transition Services. This project also leveraged the resources of the workforce system, through partnerships with local American Job Centers (AJCs).

The facilitators of GGD in the Oregon pilot sites received unanimous feedback from student participants that the GGD process had real-life impact. Students indicated that they had a better understanding of the myriad of adult service agencies available to them, as well as how to contact and connect with them. They reported that they now felt comfortable with what they have to offer an employer and knew how to communicate that to potential employers. Schools will be continuing to implement GGD, some starting with younger students, and new schools will be initiating GGD pilots in the 2018-2019 school year.

Guided Group Discovery bridges the gap between Customized Employment and Pre-ETS services, providing an efficient process and structure for coordinating transition services. GGD is easily adapted to a school schedule and can be embedded within the framework of existing classes, clubs, afterschool programs, and summer youth employment programs. Students participating in GGD classes not only learn more about themselves, their own skills and conditions for success. They also gain confidence and become familiar with the services and supports available from adult service agencies.

More people with disabilities are living and working in the community than ever before, including many who receive support from provider organizations and state agencies. These organizations play an important role in facilitating community living and employment. Organizational change is necessary as our system continues to shift away from segregating people with disabilities to a society in which people with disabilities are fully engaged and contributing their strengths and talents in their communities. However, there are well-established patterns of thinking, practice, and policy that make organizational change difficult to implement.

This paper will describe lessons learned when working with a large agency to implement organization-wide adoption of person-centered practices (PCPs) using a model of episodic and continuous change (Quinn, 1996). This includes an overview of the episodic/continuous model of organizational change, with detailed information about how to implement each type of change.

Implementing well-balanced organizational change activities and strategies, including elements of episodic and continuous change, is an effective way to work toward lasting change within agencies that support people with disabilities in fully inclusive setting. This can be a useful tool to support increased competitive, integrated employment for people with disabilities.

With the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 (WIOA), and its explicit emphasis on Federal, State, and local collaboration, a need for innovative and effective strategies for effectuating efficacious collaborative methodologies seems apropos. This APSE presentation briefly discusses both old and new methodologies for job development, and displays one collaborative approach that can be utilized in holding fidelity to a dual-customer approach for employment services for individuals with disabilities, and meeting WIOA requirements.

Identify the unique ways in which a collaborative network of employment service providers and other key stakeholders servicing the Northeast Ohio Area developed and improved employment outcomes for both businesses, community partners, and job seekers with disabilities, and identify how the implementation of this type of collaborative partnership can better support a demand-side approach to the business engagement component of job development, and the supply-side matching efficiency of job seekers for the person-centered components of job development.

The collaborative model expressed, and the associated guiding principles, have shown promise and effectiveness in bringing stakeholders from a variety of perspectives together. Further, it has displayed an increase in successful employment outcomes for people with disabilities. Lastly, while the examples put forth have been tailored to serve the unique population and geography of the region identified, the authors assert that implementing a collaborative strategy similar and in congruence with the model would be beneficial to any.

Nearly every state has adopted Employment First as a set of guiding principles and practices that target employment in typical work settings as the priority for state-funded services and supports for individuals with disabilities. However, naming employment as the state’s first priority is only one step to ensuring that every individual who wants a job has a job.

Stakeholders in Florida have worked towards improving employment opportunities for all Floridians with disabilities. Using the High-Performing States Model to structure systems change actions, state agencies and organizations developed and implemented a state-level interagency coalition, interagency cooperative agreement, and interagency plan to ensure the long-term commitment to employment across key state agencies.

Working together to identify challenges and gaps in both disability employment services and between available workers and labor market needs, Florida built upon its existing disability and employment infrastructure to develop joint plans of action that address both inter-and intra-agency goals to ensure that any Floridian with a disability who wants a job is able to become economically self-sufficient.

The Hospitality Training Program of the Palm Beaches was developed to teach the fundamentals of hotel and lodging operations, soft skills, and job readiness methods to individuals with disabilities. The program blends classroom-based and hands-on instruction to create an engaging and interactive learning environment for participants. Graduates earn industry certifications from The American Hotel and Lodging Association in areas that include Guest Service, Guestroom Attendant, and Maintenance.

The article describes CareerSource Palm Beach County’s launch, growth, and success of the Hospitality Training Program of the Palm Beaches to meet the demands and needs of employers in the Hospitality industry, one of the county’s most in-demand employers.

Personal and organizational benefits are incurred when individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are employed. However, employment rates among adults with ASD remain unacceptably low. It appears that inclusive employment requires greater community and employer awareness, and a range of strategies and actions that foster employment opportunity. There is limited research addressing employer experiences and perspectives relative to hiring, supporting and supervising persons with ASD. Further knowledge is needed to better understand employer perspectives, and guide employer capacity for engaging and supporting individuals with ASD in the workplace.

This paper explores the experiences and perspectives of employers who engaged with individuals with ASD in a workplace sampling opportunity. In doing so, results aim to ascertain strategies and barriers to nurturing greater engagement of individuals with ASD in employment.

Based on secondary review of program evaluation data, survey administration and qualitative interview data were analyzed. Findings identified perspectives of employers who had engaged with youth and young adults with ASD in employment settings. Specifically, the sample was drawn from employers who participated in a 12-week employment preparedness program for youth and young adults with ASD and employers.

Findings highlight factors that foster and impede employer engagement and support for youth and young adults with ASD relative to inclusive employment. Employer participation in this job readiness initiative nurtured knowledge gain and pro-inclusion attitudinal shifts and intention to hire individuals with ASD, based on relationship formation and knowledge gain. Employers reported numerous positive experiences and benefits from working with individuals on the autism spectrum. Benefits included workplace productivity, greater recognition of the contributions of individuals with ASD, and improved quality of work which in turn was viewed to improve employer amenity for inclusive hiring. Yet, continued reticence to employ was noted as an ongoing barrier to widespread inclusive hiring of individuals with ASD.

Generally, employer capacity building and engagement with individuals with ASD appear to have a positive influence on employer intention to inclusively hire. Overall, employers gained awareness about the competence of individuals with ASD in employment settings. Implications include guidance for engaging employers in capacity building in the aim of greater employment opportunity for youth and young adults with ASD.

Although school-business partnerships are essential elements of high-quality, community-based transition experiences, little is known about the perspective of employers on their work with schools and students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

We conducted in-depth interviews with 13 diverse businesses providing community-based work experiences to local transition students.

We examined the perspectives and recommendations of employers regarding their partnerships with local community-based transition programs.

Employers identified key factors leading them to participate, described the benefits they experienced, and highlighted challenges they encountered. They also offered advice for other employers and educators pursuing similar partnerships.

We offer recommendations for future research and practice aimed at strengthening the quality and impact of school-business partnerships.