Employment & Inclusion Conference Urges Service Providers to Ask Better Questions

In a conference for professionals who support people with disabilities at work, keynote speaker Beth Keeton urged her listeners to put the question of whether people can work to rest once and for all. Instead, she said, it’s time to focus on how to support them.

Keeton, executive director of Griffin-Hammis Associates and a nationally-recognized leader in disability employment, spoke at the Employment & Inclusion conference in Salt Lake City. The event, featuring multple sessions on fostering a better employment experience for people with disabilities, was hosted in late March by the IDRPP’s Center for Employment & Inclusion (CEI).  It was attended by 122 participants.

Nationwide, the unemployment rate of people with disabilities (8.3 percent) is double that of people without disabilities (4.1 percent).

The problem isn’t with individuals, she said; it’s systemic. Too often, opportunities for people with disabilities are unevenly applied. What’s more, expectations of work experience are different for typically-developing children, compared to their peers with disabilities.

For a typically-developing child, work begins at home, doing chores for money. As pre-teens and teenagers, the work begins to shift outside the home with babysitting or neighborhood chores like dog-walking.

But for children with disabilities, the focus is often on other things, like meeting the requirements of early intervention and preschool. School years bring little or no work exposure, and high school might offer some experience clearing tables and cleaning school grounds. Young adults with disabilities often leave high school with very little independent work experience. “And then we blame the person for not being ready,” Keeton said.

To change the outcome, service providers need to start by asking the right questions. It should not be the outdated, “Can this person work?” but, “What does it take to make this work?”

“All of us have the capacity to continue to ask different questions,” she said, urging service providers to examine what the system is incentivizing. Are they truly providing customized employment (CE), for example, or is it something else? “We know that best practice CE (Discovery, job creation through customized job development practices, etc.) works,” Keaton said in an email interview following the conference. “This was established in the CE demonstration projects in the early 2000s, and the reason it was codified into law ... However, much of what is currently being called CE does not align with best practice. So we need to focus on doing what we know works and getting the full system to support this.” Other questions she posed in her keynote: Are job coaches taking the job responsibility from the client? Are service providers acting as if their clients must choose between safety and independence?

She urged her listeners to measure what matters and emphasize accountability. “We should be looking at whether the work people are doing is really customized employment,” she wrote in an email, “i.e., in alignment with best practice standards. To do this, we need consistent and operationalized definitions of CE, and right now the field lacks this. This is why we developed the fidelity scales and are currently conducting extensive research on validating and establishing the evidence base around them. We also need to be looking at the number of hours consistently spent delivering CE on a weekly basis. Momentum and steady progress are hugely important.”

Those who measure the wrong thing consistently achieve the wrong outcomes, she told her listeners during her keynote. Keeton acknowledged that often, the entire system is geared toward asking the wrong questions, but she urged them to do what they can to push back.

Service providers know what strategies are effective, she said. It’s time provide the data on what works, and advocate for a better way.

Read more about research into customized employment on our blog.