The Way to Work

How to Facilitate Work Experiences for Youth in Transition

Richard Luecking

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781681253671
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Vocational Education

As groundbreaking legislation redefines transition practices and ideal employment outcomes for young people with disabilities, professionals need practical, up-to-date guidance on helping young adults achieve competitive, integrated employment. The new edition of this classic bestseller is your complete guide to facilitating individualized, person-centered work experiences for high school students and young adults with a range of disabilities. The first book that clearly explains how to effectively apply the requirements of Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), The Way to Work gives you the knowledge you need to adhere to the new rules and leverage new opportunities to benefit youth in transition. You'll also get the latest on critical topics covered in the first edition, from determining student strengths and needs to recruiting employer partners and designing positive work experiences. Informed by the author's three decades of experience promoting the employment success of people with disabilities, this reader-friendly guide is a must-have for transition professionals, special educators, and other professionals supporting young adults as they begin a long and fulfilling career. GET NEW GUIDANCE ON HOW TO

• Navigate the newest federal legislation on transition to work
• Apply principles of the latest transition models
• Plan workplace accommodations with employer participation
• Address recent wage regulations
• Involve families in planning work experiences

SUPPORT THE WHOLE EMPLOYMENT PROCESS: Assess students' strengths, needs, and interests * Recruit employer partners * Design work experiences that benefit both employer and employee * Help students decide when and how to disclose a disability * Promote students' social skills * Guide students in advocating for work accommodations * Facilitate workplace mentorship for young people * Collaborate with families and professionals to support the work experience PRACTICAL MATERIALS: You'll get planning organizers, interview guides, worksheets, and other downloadable forms to help you put recommended strategies into practice.

Recognizing Work Experiences as Indispensable Transition Tools

Richard G. Luecking and Kelli Thuli Crane

By completing this chapter, the reader will

•Discover the primary benefits to youth who participate in work experiences

•Understand the types and purposes of work experiences

•Learn the types and purposes of work experiences

•Consider what constitutes a quality work experience

•Engage with examples of transition models that feature work experience and that provide evidence of their value

Marquita has two strong interests. She wants to be a lawyer and she wants to “make a difference.” She is a hard-working, meticulous student. Her accommodations at school include voice recognition software on her computer. Her teacher helped her find a job shadowing experience at a small law firm where she observed the processes for legal research. She had a subsequent internship at a large law firm where she performed a range of administrative tasks and where she learned how her need to use voice recognition software could be accommodated. These experiences helped solidify her interest in law. She is now enrolled in a local university majoring in political science. Next stop: law school.

Erika always wanted to have a job and make money. Until her last year in school she had almost no exposure to work other than knowing her family members had jobs. Even her teachers had doubts about her ability to ever work in a “real” job due to her blindness and need for close supervision to perform many basic tasks. She participated in a work experience program in her last year of school, where she learned—with specific accommodations—to perform clerical tasks such as preparing mailings. She did so well that she was offered a job at that company at the end of her work experience. Many years later, she still works there.

Roberto had no notion of what kind of job or career he wanted. But he liked to be busy and active. As part of his high school transition program, he had work experiences as a grocery store shopping cart attendant and as a janitor at a shopping mall food court. He didn’t do well in either work experience. As he is nonverbal, he could never say what he liked or did not like about the experiences. Then, he sampled tasks at a recreation center’s ropes course. He was always busy at the center, filling water jugs, sorting equipment, and packaging marketing materials. His smile and his proficient work made it clear this was a good match. Now that he is out of school he works as a fitness center attendant with support from an adult employment agency.

Declan struggled in the early years of high school. He faced many behavioral challenges, and bounced back and forth between his neighborhood school and an alternative high school. Things turned around for him when he began an internship as an information technology (IT) assistant with a large research company. It challenged him and engaged his interest. He found his niche and purpose. He finished high school, completed an associate degree in IT, and is now employed as an IT technician at a small nonprofit organization.

Marquita’s, Erika’s, Roberto’s, and Declan’s stories are examples of the employment and career success that students and youth with disabilities can achieve, especially when we assume that all youth with disabilities can work and when we apply effective, evidence-based practices to make that happen. Over the past few decades, the postschool employment rates for students with disabilities are slowly but steadily inching upward. Youth in all categories of disabilities are faring slightly better in terms of postschool employment rates, with an overall employment rate now above 50% (Liu et al., 2018). This compares with overall postschool employment rates for all categories of youth with disabilities of well below 50% in the late 1980s (Blackorby & Wagner, 1996). Although these rates are not as high as they should be, they are improving, thanks in large part to newly focused policy and improved practices to plan for and facilitate work experiences. As the field continues to identify evidence-based practices that promote work, it is logical that youth with disabilities become better prepared for the world of work.

This is good news for youth, their families, disability advocates, professionals, and policy makers. It means that school-to-work transition outcomes are starting to catch up to the original legislative intent reflected in the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) of 1990 (PL 101-496), which mandated transition planning, and, more recently, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) of 2014 (PL 113-128), which mandates state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies provide services, including work experiences, for students with disabilities before they exit high school. The underpinning of each of these laws is the notion that anyone eligible for services provided through the agencies supported by these legislations has the potential to benefit from them. That is, employability is presumed.

Increased employment rates and legislation that presumes employability for youth with disabilities are the result of learning better ways to educate and prepare students and youth for transition to employment and adult life. The transition field has learned improved ways to structure resources and services to ensure that better connections are made to support youth. Most important, it has become clear that connecting youth to workplaces early and often throughout the secondary school years is a valuable way to help youth get started on productive postschool careers.

Unfortunately, many students with disabilities continue to struggle to successfully make the transition from school to adult employment. For every Roberto, Erika, Marquita, and Declan, there are other youth with disabilities who will not be so fortunate as to have their education lead directly to a job and career path. This does not have to be the case. The field of transition from school to work is ever evolving and its methodology improving. Carefully organized and monitored work experiences are part of this evolution. This chapter elaborates on why work experiences are so important, illustrates the potential they have for benefiting youth, introduces components of quality work experiences, and briefly discusses transition models that feature work experience as a centerpiece intervention.

WHY WORK EXPERIENCE IS IMPORTANT

A work-based learning experience includes essentially any activity that puts youth in the workplaces of employers and that offers an opportunity to learn about careers, career preferences, work behaviors, and specific work and occupational skills. For youth with disabilities, work-based learning has the additional benefit of helping to identify any necessary supports and accommodations that might be essential to perform tasks and engage in behaviors that are necessary for workplace success. This book refers to this type of purposeful educational and transition activity as work experience. Work experiences can include such sporadic and brief activities as job shadowing, informational interviews, and workplace tours; more intensive activities of various durations such as workplace mentoring; and other more-protracted experiences, including work sampling, service learning, on-the-job training, internships, apprenticeships, and paid employment. Each of these activities contributes to the career development, career choice, and career success of individuals with disabilities.

Benefits to Students and Youth

The textbox titled Benefits of Work Experiences summarizes research-supported benefits associated with work experiences as transition tools. For all youth, with and without disabilities, work experiences have long been shown to improve self-esteem, teach and reinforce basic academic and technical skills, promote an understanding of workplace culture and expectations, and help youth develop a network for future job searches (Haimson & Bellotti, 2001; Hoerner & Wehrley, 1995; Wehman, 2013). For youth with disabilities, these experiences further serve as opportunities to identify the particular workplace supports they may require as they pursue later employment and career prospects (Wehman, 2013).

Such experiences also serve to expose students to work and career options that would otherwise be unknown to them. This is especially critical to youth with disabilities for whom exposure to the range of career options is often very limited. For anyone, it can be said that exposure precedes interest. That is, how can anyone know if he or she likes or is interested in something without first knowing about it? One of the key values of work experiences for youth with disabilities is that they often function to introduce youth to tasks, jobs, and careers they would not know about otherwise.

Benefits of Work Experiences

Students and youth who participate in work experiences benefit by having the opportunity to

•Gain exposure to new experiences that will inform career interests

•Explore career goals

•Identify on-the-job support needs

•Develop employability skills and good work habits

•Gain an understanding of employer expectations

•Link specific classroom instruction with related work expectations and knowledge requirements

•Develop an understanding of the workplace and the connection between learning and earning

•Gain general work experience as well as experience connected to a specific job function that can be added to a work portfolio or résumé

Legal Special Education Requirements

Although not specifically cited in current special education law, work experiences can be valuable tools for education systems to meet requirements for monitoring the transition components of the law. For example, states are required by special education legislation, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) of 2004 (PL 108-446), to measure the “percent of youth aged 16 and above with transition planning that includes coordinated annual goals and transition services that will reasonably enable the student to meet his/her postsecondary goals in the identified areas” (Indicator 13, IDEIA 2004). Obviously, if those goals include employment and/or postsecondary education, then work experiences are critical to help students...