2013-10-08-Insights on Employment 1
Seminars@Hadley
Insights on Employment: Part One
Presented by
David DeNotaris – National Council of State Agencies for the Blind
Moderated by
Larry Muffet
October 8, 2013
Larry Muffet
Welcome to seminars at Hadley my name is Larry Muffet, I’m a member of the seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs at the school. Seeing as October is national disability employment awareness month, in recognition of that, today’s seminar topic is insights on employment part one. Our presenter today is David DeNotaris. David is president of the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind and he is the director of the Pennsylvania office of Vocational Rehabilitations Bureau of Blindness and Visual Services. Today David will be talking with some employment success stories and these individuals will share their insights on how they got hired and promoted, the challenges they had to overcome, and they will share some strategies for success. Without any further ado let me welcome David.
David DeNotaris
I’d like to welcome everyone to our first installment of insights on employment and I’m so grateful to the Hadley school for the Blind for allowing us this wonderful opportunity to connect, to educate, to inform, to inspire, and to learn. My guest tonight is Scott White. Scott is the director of sponsored technology programs for the National Federation of the Blind. Many of you may be familiar with Scott’s work. Scott is responsible for NSB Newsline and I truly believe, I’ve been using NSB Newsline since 1995 and I have found it to be an exceptionally helpful tool in the experiences that I’ve enjoyed. I truly believe that it’s a wonderful tool for job seekers. We’re going to be talking about Newsline but I wanted to hear from Scott, I want to thank you for coming on tonight.
Scott White
Thank you very much David for inviting me and thank you Hadley for having us.
David DeNotaris
So Scott can you tell me what does the director of sponsored technology do?
Scott White
My primary responsibility at the National Federation of the Blind is basically the day to day operations of running Newsline. It could be working with the individual persons in the individual states that we work with, the state sponsors, the blindness agencies, the talking book agencies down to also working with the individual subscribers at times. Different teachers, going around to different parts of the country and promoting the service and talking about the features.
David DeNotaris
So you have a great computer background it sounds like, tell us about your computer background.
Scott White
Well I’ve been playing with computers for a long time and I’ll probably really make myself old if I tell you the first computer I had. It was back when they were first coming out with the desktop units back in the early 80s. My college degree is in business management and micro computer technology. I went to community college in Richmond, Virginia, for that. Then after I graduated from that I went on to work. I may go ahead and start back with some of the jobs I’ve had. The first job I had was in high school, I was working at one of the local Ready Reading services there in Richmond. Basically as an announcer, studio technician was the title. I just basically worked with the volunteers and also helped make sure the programs went on at the right times and they sounded correct. Then later on I worked at a company called Access Technology which you may think had something to do with adaptive technology but it did not really until I got there and started training and selling on adaptive technology. In that particular position I worked my way up to sales manager. I’ve also sold investments, mutual funds, life insurance and things like that in the past. I worked my way around to a company that’s no longer with us anymore, Circuit City. I was an assistant and then a senior systems admin for them for ten years prior to coming to work for them,
David DeNotaris
You have a very interesting background. To back up just for a little bit, you’re totally blind, do you have any vision?
Scott White
I’ve always been legally blind. I’ve always had not 20/20 vision. During my early years during high school I was able to use some things large print and then that progressed to where I had to read braille. I could still see some when I was attending college but it was just shadows. Now it’s basically it’s hard for me to tell if a light is on in the room.
David DeNotaris
Thank you for sharing that. I wanted to ask you this, when you were speaking you said that you started working when you were in high school? Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Scott White
I would’ve been about 16, the way that I found the job was actually a friend of mine who was moving on to another opportunity, they were roughly the same age. Around 16 or 17. They had the position, we both enjoyed that type of work with audio and things like that so I just went in and interviewed for the job because I knew he was moving on to another job opportunity and things just worked out from there.
David DeNotaris
Once again it’s really the network. You were plugged into a good network there, someone had some information for you. We find that it’s really a lot of jobs are never even posted so by finding jobs through people that you know, that’s the hidden job market. Jobs that are never posted but someone says, “That job is going to become available, I know someone.” I appreciate you sharing that. So Scott it sounds like you had some vision, you continued to lose that vision and you said you went from large print to braille, that was a great transition. Can you tell me, did you ever get discouraged and if you did, tell me about that and tell me some strategies that you used to overcome the discouragement and continue to learn and work and grow?
Scott White
Well, just like anyone you’re going to have natural periods of getting discouraged as you attempt any new skill and trying to move on with things like that in different phases of your life. I was just able to work with learning the braille. Really as far as any type of challenges there, probably the most challenged that is fortunately not great but better now for the school environment is access to textbooks. At the time I went to school that was the most challenging thing for me.
David DeNotaris
I wanted to talk to you about you working in Circuit City. That was a fast paced company. Did you encounter any challenges when you went to Circuit City? Did you have any obstacles that you had to overcome or challenges that you faced in a large corporation like that?
Scott White
The first challenge was getting my foot in the door. It was a multi interview, you had two or three interviews to get through so I did that. When I went there at that time you didn’t have some of the technology that you can take with you now to make any computer talk so basically what I did was took my laptop, demonstrated to them that I could use a computer and one thing that I did to really help me get that job was I did different things for the state and so forth and I did these are a very minimal wage or I either did some volunteer work. That was very important because it was programming and I could actually put that on my resume and that was very impressive. I think it’s impressive to any employer when you have volunteer activity like that on your resume and show experience. I think it was doubly important to them that I had already demonstrated being a volunteer, I didn’t get any money for it, it gave me valuable work experience and experience with overcoming challenges. At Circuit City the challenges were numerous in dealing with the computer technology and figuring out ways to make it work. I moved up to the senior position level there in my job classification and I had several different nicknames that I got. It’s sort of when you’re in a job and you’re doing well, things are going great and everybody likes you, you sort of get nicknames. I got mine with everybody else. There were a number of challenges there to try to get the computer system to necessarily do what I wanted it to do. Sometimes I had to spend extra time to go ahead and get manuals on certain things and get them scanned during the evening I would do that so I could go ahead and read up on the operating system and things I would be working on. It did take a little bit more diligence to go ahead and spend a little bit more time and put more effort into it but it certainly paid off.
David DeNotaris
Some people might not have stuck it out. Did you have something that was driving you? Did you ever think, “This isn’t worth it?” Did you ever encounter any of that?
Scott White
I guess part of it is, yes of course you would feel that way, but it’s not in my personality to give up like that. Certain parts of challenges, in trying to figure out a computer program and all its different parts and so forth that’s an obstacle to overcome in itself. In trying to get the computer to do that it’s just another set of obstacles that I had to figure out. For example there was information that people could obtain from a visual program. You could obtain the same information by using the command line interface but nobody used the command line interface. A lot of times people found they’d come to me and say, “Oh you can do this better and faster?” Looking and being able to use the graphical interface, that was true at one time. I became just like one of the other folks working there and it was a repository, and a lot of people would come to me and ask questions.
David DeNotaris
Scott you got the job done. I meet a lot of people and talk to a lot of employers and I’ve done job development and job coaching and run job clubs, it really comes down to this. Employers really have two questions that they really need answered when you’re on an interview but legally can’t ask. Those two questions are one, how are you going to get here? An employer is sitting there thinking, “How is this guy or girl with the white cane going to get here on time?” How are they going to get here and then two, once you get here how are you going to do the work? Those are two questions they need answered but they legally can’t ask. As people who are blind if we don’t on a job interview clearly articulate, “I can take #26 bus or I’m going to carpool or I’m going to do this, I took the #26 bus it let me off at the corner of Broad and Market at 7:28 AM and I was able to walk up the street, it took me 18 minutes to walk here so clearly I’m here before 8:00 AM.” “Oh okay, wow. You can take the bus.”
Or #2, once you get here how are you going to do the work, being able to articulate that I use a variety of assistive technology. I use Jaws, I use a program called Jaws which is a screen reader program, I use this software program that allows me to enlarge a screen, I use this software program that allows me to convert documents. “Oh that’s very interesting.” I had an employer say to me one day, “Dave I’m sorry I’d love to hire some of your folks but I just can’t afford to have someone sit next to a blind person and read them the computer all day.” I said, “Luckily for us you don’t have to do that.” I opened up my laptop and showed her my screen reader and Excel and she was like, “I had no idea!” I think a lot of times informational interviews are great ways to inform ourselves of what type of jobs are in the company an what’s going on but also to inform employers about the potential of individuals with disabilities as well as the potential of assistive technology. During your introduction you said you travel all over the country and talk to different libraries and funders of the program, can you please tell us as a blind person how do you travel? Airports? Trains? What do you do?
Scott White
Most of my travel is on an airplane. For example, coming up in a couple of weeks I have to make another trip to one of the states. The airport, where the destination is in the state is probably about two hours away. There is no really good transportation in between the cities and the state, between major cities. A lot of states are getting that way now with bus transportation, et cetera. What I’m having to do is I’m going to be taking an airplane to one of the major cities and then hired a local driver that I had references on that I can use who will drive me to the city I need to go to. You just have to learn to be creative and problem solve. As far as getting around with a particular airport, getting around being in a strange environment like when you go to the hotel or anything else, the #1 challenge is in your head. Of course you need good skills, everybody needs to go through a training center and get good skills. Part of that is building your confidence and a lot of that is in your head because it’s a lot, just go ahead and give it a try. If you hear a person around and you need to ask a question like which way is this or that, there is no shame in that. Just ask and keep on going. That’s the idea with that. Basically you just do the best you can. I haven’t had a problem yet, I haven’t missed an airplane yet. I do allow myself time, extra time, in case I need it. If I ever were to need to explore the areas or get lost, getting lost sometimes is part of learning about your environment as well. I just allow myself extra time, that’s the main factor.
David DeNotaris
Scott thank you, we’ve spent some time learning about you and some of the experiences that you’ve had that have helped shape the person you are today. I’d like to talk about Newsline for a little bit. I ask you this, can Newsline serve as a tool for job seekers? If so how?
Scott White
Most definitely. I’d describe Newsline as an audio information service. The main focus tonight is on employment but also NFB Newsline provides, right now we have 370 publications on the system. We’ve got newspapers, magazines, TV listings, the one thing of interest this evening is going to be job listings. There are hundreds of thousands of job listings and you as a blind person can navigate all these job listings independently. There is nobody having to read you the job ads or anything like that. We used the website Career Builder and you go through and it’s all done on your touchtone telephone. It starts with your zip code then it’s going to ask you what type of category you’re looking in, maybe something in banking? Something in information technology? Something in finance? There are about 55 or 60 categories. Once you pick that then it’s going to go ahead and ask you such things like your educational level, do you have a high school diploma, do you have two years of college, four years of college? Then it’s going to ask you other questions like the salary range you’re looking for. You can make it a very detailed search or you can just say give me all the jobs in a certain category in the zip code you enter.