January 30, 2006
How Do We Enroll People We Know in Our Job Search?
By and large, over the past several decades, the unemployment rate among people with disabilities has remained at a general constant (roughly at the level of 70 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor).
This is true in spite of:
- Passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
- Rehabilitation Act of 1973 being on the books for decades.
- Continual rise in activism among members of the disability community who organize to speak for themselves.
- Enhanced policies that encourage employment through work incentives that enable folks to decrease dependence on long-term government assistance.
- Broad-based efforts to change attitudes about people with disabilities both through internal efforts to empower fellow people with disabilities to raise expectations of themselves and through public education campaigns that increase meaningful awareness among the overall population at large.
Given this state of affairs, it may be fair to ask: Do the true solutions to lowering the unemployment rate lie in changing the paradigms that govern how we (individually and collectively) view the world?
The old assertions are all too familiar and, for some (but by no means all), may serve as a justification for an absence of career initiation or advancement.
"I can't get a job because I'm discriminated against," I have heard.
"I would work but, if I do, I will lose my SSI, and it's just not worth it," is another comment I hear frequently.
"I would apply for different positions, but I just don't like the descriptions of the jobs that are out there, and I don't know where to start," is also a common thought.
To me, the most tragic way of thinking I once heard was, "Yes, I was offered the job that I applied for, but I changed my mind, because I don't want to fail at the job, so it's better that I just don't take it right now."
It is important for job-seekers to realize that, in addition to working diligently to identify opportunities for which one is qualified, equally important is the need to work consistently and on a daily basis to persist. Hours per day must be devoted to prospecting for various career possibilities, and it must be done in an organized and disciplined way and without simply giving up after a few tries or resigning oneself to thinking that there is no hope.
For any of us, we will ultimately get what we expect. If we expect much, we will achieve much. If we expect little or nothing, little or nothing is exactly what we will receive.
I have yet to find someone with a passionate and intense go-getter attitude who does not, in the final analysis, prove to be a success. That is because, in spite of any obstacles that may be faced on a short-term basis, success-minded individuals keep at it and strive to make changes for the better, consequently attracting to themselves success-oriented individuals and identifying real ways to move ahead in a concrete and substantive way that enables achievement to become a true, living, ongoing and ever-increasing reality.
I hope our discussion yields several things:
- What you believe to have been the barriers to your success in the past and, more importantly, what specifically you have done either to tear those barriers down or otherwise move around them, over them, under them, or through them.
- Some specific examples of when you practically gave up all hope but yet ended up attaining success simply because you persisted even when you did not think you could.
- Key lessons you have learned based on your own life's experiences within your efforts to forge your own career path.
- Key things you now want to know in order to take your proactive job-hunting to a whole new level.
Whatever we come up with on this forum, of utmost importance and priceless value is a fundamentally positive philosophy about blindness and/or visual impairment. We have nothing to be ashamed of simply because our visual acuity is less than those who are legally sighted. We need not think of our abilities as being less than others simply due to the degree to which we are able physically to see.
Whether we acquired our visual disability at birth or at some point later in life, we need not let this bar us from doing great things with our lives and, more particularly, from becoming employed in our chosen areas of interest.
During February, please use this opportunity to share with us your greatest insights with the goal of focusing on solutions to existing situations rather than simply to posing a question without any potential answers as you strive to think through specific situations.
Together, we, as a team, can come up with suggestions that may be of help to you at a real-world level.
Within this forum, we have individuals with the kind of dedication, knowledge, skill, know-how, and insight that can lead the way for empowering ourselves to do better, to endeavor more creatively, and to achieve feats beyond our wildest imagination!
Within this framework of taking personal responsibility for gaining meaningful employment, please consider this discussion question:
What information about your job search do you need to give people you know so they can help you uncover the job that's right for you?
Olegario "Ollie" D. Cantos VII, Esq.
Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division
U.S. Department of Justice
See my biography.
Disclaimer: My role at the Department of Justice is that of enforcement of existing law -- not changing existing laws or policies. I neither advocate nor oppose specific policies or practices.
Posted by Ollie at 11:29 AM | Comments (6)