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Interviewer: Michael, I know that you have a lot of experience with
job restructuring as a technique that promotes employment for people
with significant disabilities. What would you say are the critical
features of this process that an employment specialist and also the
employer should be aware of?
Michael Callahan: From the employment specialist side, it begins
with the individual and the discovery and planning process. For me,
one of the last components of a good customized employment plan is
the identification of a set of tasks that actually become the negotiating
strategies of the customized interaction with an employer. They are
the ingredients, the raw materials, of a customized job description
or a set of tasks that you learn in discovery that an individual can
offer to a community employer.
From the employer's side, employers are likely because of tradition,
U.S. Labor Law, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, to default
to job descriptions when thinking about "can this person work
here." That job description often stands as a barrier for a person
who needs a customized relationship in order to be employed. Therefore,
in order to get around the default position that the employer's likely
to take, it's necessary to clearly promote tasks as the building blocks
of this customized job description.
As I was talking about the portfolio in previous questions, the tasks
are actually the last component of the portfolio. It provides the
segway, the last thing the employer sees in the customized proposal
that the job developer makes. This is the set of tasks to be offered
by the individual. That allows the employer to think of tasks in a
way that employer's have thought about in terms of essential responsibilities,
based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The employer then puts
those tasks together into a job description.
What a customized proposal does, is untie all of those tasks that
exist in a work place and make them amenable to being targeted and
brought back together; reassembled within a customized job description.
It actually makes perfect sense, once an employer understands it that
way. But, if the proposal doesn't help the employer see the task connection
to customized employment, it can seem to be a complexity. "Well
I don’t' see what you're talking about but here's the way that
we do it," and you're right back to where you started. So again,
for me, the primary strategy with employers is taking a task perspective
around customized employment. That helps that basic set of customized
responsibilities instead of essential responsibilities; think about
them as customized responsibilities of the new job description.
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