Transcript

Interviewer: Mike, could you speak for a few minutes about, as you see it, what the specific training competencies are for someone implementing a customized employment approach?

Michael Callahan: Sure. Again, let's start with the [key] elements. We have a lot more to learn about the qualitative issues of discovery. We just need to learn how to be with people in an intentional way, not just being with them in the daily way that we do our jobs. But, being with people to figure out, "who are you?" and what does it tell me about what you might want for work? And I think that's a skill that has to be honed.

I think we also need to work as hard as we've been working and even harder to develop our skills around bringing a person's voice into the planning process. True customization starts with the individual. And, I think finding the individual’s voice requires both skills and a value perspective. And, the better we know how to do that, the more we practice that, the more we welcome, for instance, the complexity of non-professionals into planning that alone helps assure that the person's voice is heard. I think it's actually a skill-set, at one level it's a value. "Do I do it?" "Do I enter into this complexity?" But then when it happens, when I have grandma at the table, when I have Uncle Fred at the table, I have to learn how to welcome their voices and hear them and then return to the individual to make sure that it makes sense for the person. So, these are the interesting set of skills.

From the employer side, we need to know much more about negotiation. Some negotiators that I've been reading tend to indicate that human service people put all of their negotiation points on the table. We kind of pile them up hoping that the employer will say, "Yes, I'll give you this. I'll give you this." And actually for good customized employment, you need to learn how to negotiate. And I guess the final skills set, I think we need to develop, are new and more effective ways of representing the person, so that the employer can actually understand this. And I think we're looking at visual representation media of a sort that can be developed by a job developer. I'm not talking about going to a Madison Avenue Ad Agency here, I'm talking about just using good common sense imagery and narrative in ways that can help explain to an employer what might seem to be a complex concept. I think if we do those things, if we hone our presentational and representational skills, if we hone our negotiation and really learn how to listen to a person, and get to know them, we add that to the mix of skills we've been trying to learn in supported employment for years, and I think customized employment can be successful.