Vocational Engagement Model: A Journey Into the Intersection of Different Disciplines to Reinvent the Job Placement Process

By Nicholas A. Villani

Imagine the moment where you are working in the field providing employment services for people with disabilities and realize that the structure, or lack thereof, has contributed to the ongoing lack of progress, Imagine that moment where you see other disciplines such as education and medical fields engaging in their services in a more effective manner that makes every day in your job seem chaotic and redundant. Finally, imagine that there was this illuminating moment where it seemed as if you may have found the answer to the question "Why can't we make the progress we so desperately want?" That is the origin and implementation of the Vocational Engagement Model.The Vocational Engagement Model (VEM) presents the intersection of different disciplines to rethink job placement services as they are offered to people with disabilities today. The model connects aspects of the medical, educational, and rehabilitation disciplines in a process to improve the skills of the people who seek assistance to find and keep employment. VEM transcends the traditional format for job placement services, as defined by state VR systems. It is designed to manage the job placement service and exemplify cost optimization and job-seeker engagement. VEM intends tomore fully engage the job seeker, their family and circle of support in the entire job search process;establish a "career quest" agreement on how services will be provided and establish the level of commitment and required activities for both the job seeker and career consultant;learn how to use a series of assessment instruments that will assist the career consultant to best counsel the job seeker with use of metacognitive skills;manage the job placement service both structurally and fiscally for cost optimization to minimize time from referral to placement, thereby facilitating personal engagement while managing the hours toward profitability; andestablish Vocational Engagement Teams (VET) to create peer support systems and maximize staff skill and supports, not unlike "rounds" in the medical model;The Vocational Engagement Model is the evolutionary change in the provision of job placement services. It encourages "guardrails" for staff to work within while retaining their own creativity. The end result is total personal engagement, management of the job placement process with true cost optimization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643349855

Book preview

Chapter One

Chapter One: Rationale and Origins for the Vocational Engagement Model for Successful Job Placement

In Our Field, We Have a Data Dilemma

In 2017 the employment rate for individuals with disabilities in the United States was approximately 37.3 percent of the total population of approximately forty million Americans working. In New York State the number was slightly lower at approximately 34.9 percent.

The problem is that the percentage of people with disabilities employed in New York in 2008 was 36.2 percent, a lower rate than today. Therefore, we have a data dilemma! In almost ten years of considering all the vocational rehabilitation funds spent, all the special education money spent, all the human effort spent, there is little improvement to show for it. The reasons could be in the special education system, the vocational rehabilitation (VR) system, or maybe in the business community whom we expect to hire these individuals. To determine where the fault or faults lie is not the purpose for this manual. What this manual does is outline a very different process of providing this necessary service to offset traditional ways of delivering job placement services that, whether we want to admit or not, has had little statistical impact upon the people it was meant to support.

VEM reimagines the approaches that have been used traditionally and enables schools and VR-funded agencies to take a very structured approach to a very chaotic and individualized system. VEM creates a structure that can be modified and expanded upon but most importantly establishes guardrails to enable organizations and practitioners to use the structure that currently isn’t there. I use the term guardrails rather than guidelines because of the need for flexibility due to individualized differences and nature of different disabilities and individual people’s interests and needs. VEM encourages service providers to be creative, use the formats, use the structure but stay within the guardrails and don’t run off the road.

Rationale

The primary rationale and motive for VEM is to create a format for job placement staff to follow and integrate several disciplines into a structured approach for job placement success. There is a considerable amount of training and structures for supported employment, serving the most disabled of individuals, but not necessarily for job placement services. Supported employment practitioners and programs generally serve those individuals with more significant disabilities requiring a more-intensive support. Job placement services offers a set of services for a very different type of individual. These individuals are somewhat different, more complex. They generally can have a range of educational backgrounds from high school credentials for special education to individuals with a master’s degree and beyond.

In addition to the recognition of the complexity of job placement services, it is important to note that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field purposely drifted away from job placement activities for people with disabilities toward supported employment services for both agency financial and individual social reasons. In New York the focus upon Medicaid for funding these services and growing day programs as the means for agencies to grow and remain financially strong competed with and began to negatively affect the agency’s employment initiatives. Agencies put their efforts into programs for the most disabled because of governmental insistence as well as the financial benefits from that emphasis. As supported employment providers integrated this system into their catalogue of services, what eventually became known somewhat sarcastically as the disability industrial complex systematically began to move away from providing services to individuals needing a lesser-dependent service. In other words, a service that essentially enables the person to become independent of the service provider at the conclusion of services was not as financially desirable. Note that this is not indeed directed to define the actions of all agencies, but a large number of them did leave job placement services behind and moved resources and staffing toward the Medicaid services, especially in New York State.

There was also a similar movement in the education system wherein the litigation and emphasis turned toward the students who were deemed to graduate school under the classification of alternate-assessment students. In addition, this new focus pushed those students capable (and some marginally so) toward a high school diploma, and in New York a Regents Diploma. There was an increased emphasis on college outcomes. This push toward college was in reaction to a need to create a more educated and capable workforce; however, this may have created a level of anxiety and problems for those students not truly fit or properly prepared for college. After a sometimes-problematic attempt, college students enrolled in the wrong path or dropping out are left with few alternatives and skills to tackle the workforce, notwithstanding the current need for tradespeople and manufacturing employees. As a crucial job path, these positions sometimes offer salary considerations higher than those offered to college graduates. Reality is, however, that trades and manufacturing are not as valued as those requiring a college degree; and as a result, students often are not informed of these career paths at all. The sad reality is that if these career paths had been considered for the students with disabilities, thereby offering them a true work experience in high school, they may have been successful in college. Research has strongly indicated that if individuals with disabilities had engaged in work experiences while in high school, they perform better in college as well as in the workforce.

The genesis for VEM was built upon a long frustration for finding the silver bullet to systematize and reduce variation within the job placement process in order to increase the efficiencies and effectiveness of job placement services. Well, there is no silver bullet. VEM provides a structure that will reduce the inherent variations and dead ends that both administrators and staff will often find themselves in. The rationale for VEM is to reduce variations within programs that most often lead to cost inefficiencies, student and client frustrations, staff frustrations, and overall chaos that is inherent to the traditional system. VEM also provides staff with those formats needed toward developing their own skills and capabilities while providing guardrails to stay on the path needed for job placement development. Reduction of variations does not mean eliminate, but if your agency or school follows VEM, you will find a significant improvement in outcomes for job placement and increase cost optimization. In addition, you will find that there is a collateral effect of improving staff skill through the Vocational Engagement Team meetings, which are highly structured formats for staff brainstorming and critical thinking. The concept of VEM is simple: improve client and staff skill in the job placement process and reduce hours of services through a cost-optimization process.

Cost Optimization

Finding an alternative with the most cost-effective or highest achievable performance under the given constraints by maximizing desired factors and minimizing undesired ones. In comparison, maximization means trying to attain the highest or maximum result or outcome without regard to cost or expense. Practice of optimization is restricted by the lack of full information and the lack of time to evaluate what information is available. In computer simulation (modeling) of business problems, optimization is achieved usually by using linear programming techniques of operations research.

Essentially, the primary rationale is that the prior systems, schools, and provider agencies have not put a dent into the overall employment rates of individuals with disabilities. The Vocational Engagement Model is designed to affect this if fully implemented systematically and with vigor.

The chart below illustrates the lack of progress in the field of employment for people with disabilities in New York State. In other states the numbers can differ, but notice the shorter bar in the graph is not demonstrating any significant change over the eight years illustrated.

Chart 1

Origins

The Vocational Engagement Model was developed during one of the most stressful times of my life. The event that shaped the forming of the VEM was the treatment of my youngest son, Anthony, during his fight with cancer. He is successful in that battle and is cancer-free. From that two-year-long soul-searching experience, I learned a great deal—starting from the initial shock to learning of the spread of the cancer to working with my family to overcome this challenge for Anthony. During the time, we were going through this ordeal, and the issues that surround this situation I observed a definitive contrast in the manner that my son and my family were treated versus the traditional manner in which we treat the clients in the vocational rehabilitation field. I also saw the contrast of the medical field’s immediacy of now in how the treatments were planned and implemented: the functioning of teams across two states to coordinate services; the cooperation of teams at Sloan Kettering and the Orlando Cancer Institute each working together to address this disease; the description of the percentages of potential life-threatening acceleration of the disease with different levels of treatment and the recommended treatment considering those percentages; the percentage of return of the cancer with or without the comprehensive surgical procedure; the intensity of the chemo, five days in a row with a two-week interval between treatments over several months; essentially, the discussions of the results of the chemo treatment (one of the most aggressive treatments for a very virulent form of cancer). All the side effects both short and long were discussed and percentages of probability of return of the cancer and the organs that may be affected. We received the complete and extremely troubling information in a manner that both frightened us as well as gave us hope and understanding.

The contrast of this model to the one I built my career on struck me one day when driving to the hospital for one of my son’s over twenty chemo treatments. If we applied the same rules, intensity and practices, and discussion of percentages of people with disabilities who are working, could we alter the perspective of the student/clients we offer services to in their quest for employment? The overall recovery approach to my son’s medical needs so contrasted with my professional approach its comparison forced me to consider how we do the service we/I have committed my life’s work toward.

I had to ask myself, Are we informing our students/clients that someone with a disability who resides in New York State is part of the statistic of approximately only 34 percent of individuals with disabilities are working?

Are we starting the job development process from the onset to determine how the student/client will react to placement?

Did we discuss the approximate time frames it was to take for them to achieve employment?

Are we pursuing employment and career goals that have limited potential for employment with any one student/client?

Are we going full throttle into the problem-solving of the person’s unemployment situation in order to get their life on track?

Are we counseling them based upon each individual counselor’s skill level and through an elongated process of learning for each individual?

What if the counselor wasn’t very good at getting this information or counseling in general?

Have we addressed the issues found in learning decay models when we meet with students/clients once a week or less?

All these questions were juxtaposed against the experience I had with my son’s illness. The way we treated clients in their own often debilitating situation of being unemployed clearly fell short of the efforts made for and with my son during his cancer-treatment regime. Now, let me make this abundantly clear, I am not comparing unemployment and cancer and indicating they are in the same plane of distress. They are not. However, long-term unemployment or mal-employment (stuck in a bad job due to one’s disability) can be mentally disabling, create both high anxiety and depression, and essentially disempower someone who is both disabled and without a viable income. I have seen this condition most prevalent in individuals in the autism spectrum where the level of anxiety is already there and could impact them even further with greater stressors placed upon them.

The essential revelation of dealing with my personal issues was a realization that organizational structures for job placement across our field was beyond flawed. There was no real organized structure. I am sure individual agencies develop their internal structure, but essentially, there was no format or structure for agencies to build their own models upon for consistency. My personal issues and its most difficult situation forced me to reevaluate everything in my life, including my lifelong work in the profession of school-to-work transition and vocational rehabilitation.

The other contrast that made the issues apparent is the data collection that occurred in the medical field. In our agency, we instituted analytics to provide us with data as to how many hours of service was offered to achieve informed job placements. In addition, there is the measuring of time frames of services and outcome into employment. All these provide us with a picture of how we are offering the services to our student/clients. Of course, all this information is guided through a lens that is provided by the state VR systems. And it is reality that under this lens, we measure our performance via a model that often does not equate to the needs of the clients we are asked to support by the very same system.

Macro Versus Micro Analytics

In the case of my agency, the macro analytics were excellent, and we patted ourselves on our respective backs. The micro analytics were telling us something very different. The state VR systems provides us with data on how our agency is doing in our region and statewide. All indicators of the macro analytics were very positive as we exceeded the local averages for days from referral to placement, total referrals to placement, etc. The problem was the internal micro analytics that were so troublesome. The analytics tell us a