Work Experience Expectations (Expanded Discovery)

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BBI

WORK EXPERIENCE EXPECTATIONS (EXPANDED DISCOVERY)

FEBRUARY 3, 2014

2:00 P.M. ET

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ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION SERVICES, LLC

PO BOX 278

LOMBARD, IL 60148

800-335-0911

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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(lost initial opening remarks)

> Who offer customized employment through all of our Southeast TACE voc rehab agencies so we have been working together throughout the southeast. Discovery is one of the first strategies that we teach in that effort. Michael Callahan is president of Marc Gold & Associates is presenting our webinar today on "Work Experiences as Expanded Discovery". Mike is a long - time leader in the field of disability services with a particular focus on employment. Mike has also gone way out of the way throughout his career to make sure that we don't look at some people and not see them as employable. So the strategies that he'll be talking to you about are those strategies that will be effective with transition age students that would also likely be eligible for Supported Employment. So as you're listening to this today, think about transition and think about transitions that would include students graduating or leaving school that did not necessarily get a diploma or -- but also aged out of school or certificate of attendance. There are various different ways in which youth leave our school system so when you listen to the webinar today, I want you to have that mindset that Michael Callahan is speaking of all youth, all adults when he talks about this as a presentation or as a strategy. Michael Callahan has been training people all over the United States and internationally with a focus on working with people that we feel may have a complexities that many people see and then say they are not employable. So the strategies you're going to be hearing about today represent a full inclusion model that serves all people. Mike is located -- located in Goshay (phonetic) Mississippi and leads a network of associates that represent the philosophy that all people are employable.

Mike, let me turn it over to you and let me re mind everybody that if you have questions, please write them in the chat room. I will follow those. I'll find an appropriate spot. We're going to ask all questions will be answered at the end of his presentation. He'll be giving approximately a little over an hour presentation. So be prepared, sit back, take notes while you're listening. Think about questions that you got so that at the end if you haven't written them during the call, you actually can write them at the end.

So with that, let me turn this over to Mike Callahan. Michael?

> MICHAEL CALLAHAN: Thanks, norciva. And good day, everybody. Thank you all for being on the call. And I'm excited about doing this webinar. It's actually going to be in three parts. As Norciva said for those of us working in the southeast region and those of you from the states that Norciva named in region IV of TACE, you'll know the information of discovery pretty well. Because you've had a number of webinar opportunities.

For some of the rest of you in other parts of the country, this may be a relatively new concept. So one of the things I'm going to do for about a third of the webinar is to give you a quick over view of discovery with enough information so you'll have a good idea at least from our perspective what it is that we're talking about.

Then I want to get into the work experience component of this. And how discovery links with work experiences. And I'm going to start particularly for those of you who may have relationships with local school districts and you're really working with teachers who are trying to prepare students for a working life, one of the interesting pieces of data that we have learned in the last ten years is that the highest correlation of success for students with disabilities transitioning from school to adult employment is whether they have had a work experience. Really nothing correlates as strongly as that. And so for those of you working directly with teachers and possibly even having students on your caseloads, depending on your state then I'm going to have an area of the webinar where we are going to talk about ways in which you might collaborate and to whatever degree it's appropriate even give some advice and direction to teacher in special education transition.

Then I'm going to end the webinar with a perspective about what I think is a newly emerging strategy that Norciva and I are part of a national demonstration about. And that deals with the role of paid internships as a -- not only a component of discovery but as what we hope will become a component of quality rehabilitation services. And we're collecting the data on that as we speak. And I'll give you a headsup and try you to tie all of this together with discovery and then expanded discovery.

As Norciva said, we'll be holding our questions primarily at the end. But you're welcome to enter your questions throughout and then we'll go down the list and I'll take as many questions as I have time for.

So that's the way we're going to handle it. Now what I'm going to try to do is let you know when I transition from one slide to Norciva. Any of you might have visual impairments and also just try to explain what's on any pictorial slide for that same reason.

So let's deal right up front with this term of art that's been around now for actually closing in on 30 years, about 28 years we've been trying to come to terms in exploring and getting the word out about the possibility of discovery. And at the most functional way of thinking about it, discovery is a foundation component meaning we start at the very beginning of the employment search with discovery and it's an alternative to what we might think of as traditional vocational assessment those assessments that tend to be quantitative in nature and compare individuals to norms or out come expectations.

So basically discovery is a form of qualitative research. And from the beginning Norciva pointed this out in her introduction, discovery is completely in line with both the ' 92 and ' 98 amendments to the Rehab Act. When Congress directed voc rehab services to generally presume benefit and discovery does that same thing discovery proceeds with the assumption that all individuals can benefit in terms of rehabilitation out come so the essential question of discovery is a qualitative question that starts with: Who is this person? Now obviously it gets more complex than that. But one of my favorite quotes is by a gentleman who gained notoriety back in the 1930s for identifying Vitamin C. As a component of citric acid. Gyorgyi is the best I can do with his last name. And yet his quote, his command of the English language for a Hungarian physician was really quite astounding. And in -- and one of the things that Dr. Gyorgyi recognized or recommended that we think about was discovery being an idea that looks at the same thing as everyone else and we think something different.

And because many people particularly many people who come to voc rehab with very significant disability often don't do well on the sorts of assessments that would indicate the likelihood of benefit, we have to look at the same person and think something different. And I take a great deal of guidance from this saying and it's embedded throughout all of the information we'll be talking about today.

Going to Slide 4, on the role of discovery. Basically what is it that we are attempting to do when we do this? So we're using a non- traditional oftentimes common sense way of thinking about the information used to identify strengths, needs and interests of any person with a complex life. And I use the terms of art strengths, needs and interests from the definition that the Office of Disability Employment Policy within U.S. DOL first coined about 13 years ago when they rolled out the idea of customized employment. And discovery takes this same set of principles and we word them just a little differently. So I'm moving now to Slide 5.and with all of our effort, all of the activity of discovery, it really distills to a focus area in three areas. And this is -- it really kind of helps you get your head around what would seem to be a -- a lot of activity, how do you really come to terms with essentially what does discovery do? If we can learn three aspects, conditions for success -- and I'll say more about each of these -- what kinds of conditions need to be in place with this person to be successful. Interest toward certain aspects of the job or Labor Market and what does this person have specifically and uniquely to offer to employers not generally but very, very specifically.

If we can find the answer to these three areas, if we can find answers to these, what we found over the past 28 years is you really got enough information to move forward with a blueprint for employment. Now I might say an employment plan. But I don't want to confuse the whole idea of an IPE and the IPE is something that I know everyone -- everybody on this call understands and utilizes but the individualized plan for employment targets a rehabilitation out come and authorizes services from voc rehab the plan I'm talking about is really a blueprint building plan so we can make sure these necessary components are included in any job that we find for the person. So I'm going to go forward now to -- and we'll examine briefly each of the concepts that I've just talked about. So we'll start on Slide 6 with conditions. And you'll notice that the heading of this slide is characteristics of an ideal job. We think particularly for people who have significant impact of disability in the area of work that if we don't identify the ideal, then the possible seems impossible. Or maybe the probable seems impossible. But if we can identify ideal conditions, even if we don't achieve those, at least we know if we had all of these things in place, employment then becomes a possibility. And that's the way we think about it with discovery and certainly with the -- kind of the over arching concept that many of you may have heard about customized employment.

So conditions are characteristics of any job, whatever the job happens to be, that fits the individual uniquely in terms of the best way to think about it is to say it like if these things were in place, it would be likely that the job would be successful. Or you might say more successful than if the person simply had to suck it up and get over it.

And one of the things I find with understanding conditions, I always personalize this. And one of the things I hate, I've got all of about a 20 minute commute to work. And for some of you, you would think that would be laughable. But for me, that 20 minute commute is much, much longer than I would like. For a job to really be successful for me. I would like to reduce my commute. That's a condition for success.

For some people when they go to work, if the job is on the other side of the county or even the other side of town and it might be you know two bus transfers or very fragile agency transportation services, a lot of times we push conditions to the very edge and jobs fall apart when we don't get them right. Now I just used distance from work. But there's all kinds of features that conditions refer to.

For most of us if we were to get another job pay would be right up at the top, how much do we want. Does the job have benefits where in town is it do I have to work out side in the winter or the summer or do I have a desk or job space in an air conditioned or heated building. What times of day if I'm a morning person do I have to work the late evening shift or vice versa if I'm an evening person do I have to get up at the crack of down -- cram of dawn. These are -- crack of dawn. These are all things in discovery we look at peoples lives find out what's working for them in their lives and we'll talk later about the strategy we use to take things that work in life and apply them to work. I'll talk about that in just a few minutes. And we actually come up with a listing as part of the blueprint of like go/no go conditions, if these things are there, it's likely to work. And if we violate those, it's likely not to work. I think too often we ask job seekers with significant disability just deal with it, just suck it up. You know if you really want a job you will get up and go to work early or you'll work all day long that's what the employer wants. But with customized employment we can actually negotiate

Now on Slide 7 first of all interests are things we want to do. So many of you have heard -- it occurs to me that the popular media has really grasped onto this lately although I didn't see it on the Super Bowl yesterday but Budweiser is doing what they call third shift lager and in that commercial they tell us if you work it -- if you're doing a job you love you'll never work a day in your life. I believe that. That's one of the things that so many of us that actually love our work, it doesn't feel so much like work. And that relates to the concept of interest.

Not just what we say we want to do and not just what job titles we would be interested in. But really what -- what -- you know it ignites our passions and at the end of the day one of the things we try to do in discovery is to determine what we might refer to as intrinsic interests. Those things that we do that's of us, not just that we are expected to do by others but that we really want to do. And all a of us have these intrinsic interests. And if we can figure out those things and help people really get beyond just answering the question what do you want to do, what kind of job do you want, what kind of job title, but really looking at each person's life and finding out what truly intrinsically motivates them, we've got something very powerful to move forward on.