Future of Vocational Rehabilitation Comments
February 14, 2006
Remarks Prepared by Bradford C. Turner-Little, Easter Seals, Inc.
Thank you, Carl, for this opportunity to share my thoughts about the future of vocational rehabilitation. As I began to grapple with a framework to formulate a “vision of the future’” I turned first to the guidance questions Carl provided to those of us in attendance today. Those questions led me not to answers, but rather to a more macro level of questions which I determined must first be answered before envisioning how VR might function in the future. I would propose that we must first explore what the workplace might be like in 2015 before we can effectively engage in a conversation about VR and its future services.
A number of groups have begun exploring this question – the Society for Human Resources Management, the Employers Resource Council, and others. Though their thoughts are obviously conjectures – none profess to have a functioning crystal ball – they do coalesce around several important themes.
All propose that the majority of commodity jobs will either be automated or outsourced. Entry level and/or support jobs that have been performed by hourly workers will become less and less a feature of the workplace over the next decade. Companies will opt to automate these functions or will simply contract with an external entity to perform these services. This change will enable corporations to be smaller, some projecting by up to 40% of today’s labor force.
Technology will continue to accelerate altering the way “work” occurs. Ten years ago I had to fight to get a paiger as a job placement specialist, now I can’t function without my personal digital assistant that serves as a cell phone, email access point, and word processor. “Work” will become more technology dependent – increasing the need for workers to be technologically proficient. At the same time, efforts will be made to make technology more easily integrated into people’s lives, making it more user friendly and having interfaces that are less cumbersome and more seamless.
Technological advancements, combined with an increasing amount of outsourcing for administrative and support functions, will create increasing opportunities for niche industries and entrepreneurial ventures. Small business growth will accelerate, increasing the need for highly adaptable and flexible workers. This trend may also generate more part-time and/or job sharing opportunities as workers become even more transient, moving from employer to employer and even department to department in an almost contractual relationship.
Workers will be challenged to be not only more flexible and adaptive to survive, they will also have to demonstrate a commitment to life long skill enhancement. Global economies will necessitate multi-lingual employees – and businesses may well start offering language classes to their employee bases to ensure they can compete beyond our national borders.
So, what can we conclude from these theories about the 2015 workplace? What will workers need in order to survive and thrive in this new work environment? They will need to be more flexible than ever before, and demonstrate an ability to adapt to a variety of workplaces and tasks. They will need to engage in career long professional and skill development. Gone will be the days when a job is done the same way it was done 20 years ago. The way work happens will change at an ever increasing speed. Performance will be the gauge for reward, not longevity. They will need technology and language skills that a generation ago were thought only relevant to the highly specialized or top level managers.
So then, the question becomes what will people with disabilities need to be engaged in this workplace? They will need what the general workforce needs, the flexibility and adaptation skills of the general workforce as well as the ability to increase, modify or refine their skill sets – and the systems that serve them will need to reflect these needs. Persons with disabilities will need flexible services with easy entry points. They will also need increased access to skill development services over the course of their worklife.
So what can VR do to meet those needs? I offer several suggestions:
- Focus on long-term engagement: Change will be the name of the game in the 2015 workplace, and without supports, change will quickly turn into chaos for many of the people VR serves. VR will need to discern long-term service strategies that remain available to clients well beyond the current loosely defined and understood “post-employment services.” Current policy and program requirements are prohibitive for this sort of thinking and would need to be reshaped to reflect an openness to support and development throughout the career of a person with a disability. For VR to have the kind of impact on the lives of people it serves that it truly desires, VR clients should be able to access services not just when they are seeking work but well into their worklife.
- Emphasize thriving in a changing work context: The emphasis of today’s VR service delivery structure is primarily on job entrance, not work longevity. This foci is short-sighted and potentially damaging to individuals with disabilities in the long-run as it does little to prepare people to understand the nature of the workplace they are entering, much less the work place ten years from now. The 2015 VR service delivery structure should be one that prepares its clientele to deal appropriately with frequent change in workplace expectations and performance requirements. It will need to teach people how to take advantage of those changes and work them to their own benefit, not be swept up by them and lost in the undertow they create.
- Support ongoing skills development: Workers across the 2015 workforce will be engaged in skill development over the course of their careers. Both employer-sponsored and self-initiated training will become a mainstay of work place expectation. VR will need to place greater emphasis on creating easy access to accessible training options by both working with the employer community and partnering with the community college systems to open up opportunities for short-term skill development for people with disabilities. Additionally it will need to create training mechanisms to respond to the advances in workplace technology and globalization.
- Increase services related to self employment: The emergence of niche businesses focused on providing support services to corporations will offer an expanding opportunity for individuals with disabilities to go into business for themselves. Unfortunately, supports for VR clientele that are interested in “going out on their own” are limited and difficult to access. Current business start-up supports for the general population more often than not fail to address the needs of individuals with disabilities. VR can step into that gap and offer resources, both capital and strategic, to enable people with disabilities to benefit from growth in this sector of our economy.
In closing, I would offer that for vocational rehabilitation to truly meet the needs of the 2015 worker with a disability, it must embrace a new service paradigm. It must seek to understand the workplace of the future and respond proactively to what it learns. It can no longer be job placement driven; it must be demand-driven. I do not mean the Department of Labor’s definition of demand being what business wants. VR, in holding to its person-centered philosophy, must adopt a career development paradigm which seeks to understand the needs of the worker with a disability a decade from now and designs itself to respond effectively to those needs. It should prepare workers to be flexible and adaptive over the course of their careers. It should seek ways to provide and promote life-long learning. For if it does not, it will be preparing workers to enter the work place of yesterday, leaving them ill-equipped to capitalize on the opportunities this new workplace will provide.
