About Disability Employment

This is a guest post from Robert B. Nicholas, Ph.D., Senior Visiting Fellow for Disability Research, John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

I coordinate the research agenda and provide technical assistance for the NTAR Leadership Center. My background is an almost forty year career in the planning and administration of services and supports for people with disabilities. I have been part of the transition of people with disabilities from institutions to communities. I have participated in the growth of supported employment from its infancy and provided technical assistance to an ODEP Customized Employment Grant. I continue to be inspired by the capability of people with disabilities to work and the often dramatic improvement in quality of life which results from employment.

It is from the perspective of a disability system professional that I was moved by the call to arms from my colleague and friend Lisa Stern in her January blog. In reference to disability employment services, she says “It’s not working” and concludes that we need to be exploring new approaches. I agree whole heartedly. This isn’t to say that we haven’t made fundamental progress in the employment of people with disabilities. In fact, across the nation there are rich examples of people with diverse disabilities working at skilled, complex jobs. They have shown conclusively that people with disabilities want to work when given opportunities and appropriate supports and can be a valuable resource to employers in meeting their workforce needs. Our challenge is to replicate these possibilities for the unacceptably high percentage of people with disabilities not currently included in the nation’s workforce.

The NTAR Leadership Center is pursuing important new directions in the employment of people with disabilities in response to this challenge. The Center is fostering the inclusion of people with disabilities in workforce planning and generic workforce services systems. The Center is aware that a growing number of the nation’s leading employers have recognized the “business case” for employing people with disabilities and have established disability recruitment initiatives. Accordingly, the Center is highlighting effective strategies for collaboration between the disability and generic services systems to support employers to meet their workforce needs through the recruitment and retention of employees with disabilities. The NTAR Leadership Center’s approach is consistent with the fundamental value driving change in disability systems; full inclusion of people with disabilities in our nation’s communities.

It is important to note that the NTAR Leadership Center’s efforts do not compete with other important disability employment efforts such as Customized Employment, Medicaid Infrastructure Grants, and Employment First initiatives. Indeed, effective, well coordinated disability system supports are essential to the success of employer recruitment efforts. I believe strongly, however, that progress in increasing the workforce participation rates of people with disabilities will be employer driven and based on the “business case.”

Insights from National Research

Many of us who work in the field of employment supports for people with disabilities often become frustrated by the ongoing high rates of unemployment (and underemployment) for people with disabilities. We see ourselves toiling year after year to get more people employed, and wish that employment was a reality for all persons with disabilities. We see the positive outcomes of working, and wonder why so few people with disabilities are gainfully employed.

Part of the problem is that we have been working primarily on the supply side – working to improve the supply of ready and able workers. As a field, we have not paid enough attention to the demand side. We have not created the need for workers with disabilities among employers. As a co-author of the soon to be released NTAR Leadership Center research report "Ready and Able," I had the opportunity to visit and learn about a number of exciting and innovative demand-side programs bringing people with disabilities into the workforce on a broad scale. As I visited these programs and interviewed people involved in these projects, including persons with disabilities, I was impressed by the vision and ingenuity of the businesses and employment organizations.

In this blog entry, I will highlight a couple of them and share some impressions and questions. Project SEARCH at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has resulted in many people becoming employed and gaining work experiences. Project SEARCH was initiated by Erin Reihle, RN, from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and has been replicated across the globe, moving into fields other than health care, and offering a promising model for blending demand and supply to bring people with disabilities into the workforce.

Our research project offers an in-depth profile of a replication occurring at Monmouth Medical Center in Red Bank, NJ, showing how the model can be adapted to meet individual employer needs. The New Bedford, MA Chamber of Commerce’s Supported Employment Network offers an example of a unique partnership between the business community and local disability employment organizations, with funding from the local office of the state developmental disability support agency. This collaboration has resulted in hundreds and hundreds of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities working and contributing their labor to the community and local economy.

These two efforts, along with the other profiles created in our research project, document unique, business-led effort to gain valuable employees from diverse groups and create pipelines for hiring workers. As such, these efforts also assure that Americans with disabilities can enjoy the same benefits of work as most other people, both monetary and personal.

The question is, why are these great collaborations the exception rather than the rule? Don’t businesses want good employees? Don’t people with disabilities want to work?

The easy answer for this is that it requires people to reach out to different communities. Businesses usually talk to other business. When the local branch of the state developmental disability state agency in New Bedford, MA reached out to the Chamber of Commerce, there was a positive response, as the director of the Chamber at that time was already involved in the community above and beyond representing business interests. A failure to collaborate on either part would have doomed this project. Openness to difference, however, will result in the meeting of supply and demand, and in our research profiles, we have given a number of wonderful examples of this.

Dan Baker
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities
Co-Investigator, NTAR Leadership Center National Research

NTAR Leadership Center National Research: Ready and Able

Over the last year or so, I have been working on an exciting research project through the NTAR Leadership Center. My colleagues and I are profiling market-driven practices that promote employment for people with disabilities. We have been especially interested in learning about partnerships with employers that lead to increased hiring, retention, promotion or accommodation of people with disabilities. At this point, we have completed our field visits, interviews and other research, and we are now in the process of writing up what we found in a report to be called, “Ready and Able.”

While all of the people we spoke to in doing our research have a common belief that people with disabilities can work and want to work, the word that comes to mind to describe our research is “diversity.” For a start, our research team is comprised of people with different backgrounds. I have experience primarily with the “mainstream” workforce development system, and my two colleagues – Bob Nicholas and Dan Baker – have extensive experience with disability systems. The experience of seeing the subjects of our profiles through these different lenses has enriched the research and led to greater understanding of diverse perspectives.

We have found amazing diversity in the approaches we are profiling. Employers partner and collaborate to employ people with disabilities in so many different ways. We are seeing collaborations between major national employers and public sector agencies. Some models focus on a particular industry or occupational sector, in partnership with public or nonprofit intermediary organizations. We talked to different types of job brokers – a private staffing service and a non-profit “Alternative Staffing Organization” – to understand how they work to increase employment of people with disabilities. We found some really great partnerships that expand opportunities for college students and graduates with disabilities. And we also spoke to people working in local and regional hubs that bridge the gap between people with disabilities and employers. We found some great people and organizations working in creative ways to act as catalysts for disability and employment partnerships.

The research also reminded me of the diversity among people with disabilities – so many different types of people, so many different needs and approaches. And we have found, in many cases, that companies are increasingly seeing disability as another dimension of diversity – within their workforces and their customer bases.

While the approaches are varied, there are some important common themes that are emerging. Employers are embracing the business case for employing people with disabilities. They see individuals with disabilities as adding value and positively affecting the company’s or organization’s “bottom line.” One person called this being smart, not nice. The more successful experiences employers have, the more they want to hire people with disabilities. At the same time, employers do not want to have to maintain relationships with many varied disability service organizations. They want a partner to make it easy for them to recruit, hire, train and support people with disabilities. A good partnership or collaboration can serve this function. For a number of companies that have made a clear commitment to disability as diversity, the only question is how best to accomplish this.

Our research has shown me that “diversity” means creativity, great ideas and different approaches that enrich and strengthen the ways in which the private, public and non-profit sectors can work together to increase employment of people with disabilities. Stay tuned for the complete “Ready and Able” report. Meanwhile, tell us about your diverse experiences with partnerships that promote employment for people with disabilities.


Ronnie Kauder
Senior Practitioner in Residence, Heldrich Center
Principal Investigator, NTAR Leadership Center National Research