Opportunities for Further Progress

All sectors — business, labour, community agencies, persons with disabilities and their advocates — have a role to play in improving the employment situation of persons with disabilities.

For example, helping people with disabilities to increase their participation in the labour market involves efforts at several levels. The effective practices below portray initiatives by governments designed to remove disincentives to employment, and provide flexible support to persons with disabilities who are working to re-enter the labour market.

The effective practices also show that employers can be successful in taking a proactive approach to recruiting and maintaining persons with disabilities as part of their skilled workforce. The role of front-line service providers and community organizations in working with persons with disabilities, employers, and government agencies to identify opportunities and facilitate workplace accommodation is also highlighted.

Research has shown that education and training are linked to success in employment. Enhanced access to education, training and skills development, through disability supports and accommodation in learning institutions, can help build this important bridge to full inclusion through employment. Assisting young people with disabilities to make successful transitions to the workplace is also a key element, as experience with cooperative education programs, internships, and career-related summer job initiatives have shown.

Persons with disabilities have pointed out that a consumer-driven approach to training and vocational rehabilitation initiatives permits the fine-tuning that is needed for participants to proceed at their own rate and with the full range of interventions they require. The effective practices examples throughout this report underscore the value of this approach. Improved labour market information to support individual planning, and improved marketing of the hiring of persons with disabilities are examples of areas well suited to broad cross-sector cooperation.

Aboriginal persons with disabilities have stressed the importance of training and employment programs that are designed, developed and delivered in culturally relevant ways. Specific examples of such initiatives are also described in the effective practices section.

Persons with disabilities and disability advocates have called for a comprehensive labour market strategy that necessarily involves collaboration by employers, unions, community groups, learning institutions, as well as governments and persons with disabilities. The effective practices demonstrate how well such collaboration on employment for persons with disabilities can work.

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