Getting a job, getting a life: The workplace and young people with LD
The process of transition from school to employment begins much earlier than the waning days of high school. Indeed, with all that needs to be considered and put into action, transition planning should start no later than the first days of high school. Since the vast majority of students with learning disabilities (LD) go straight from school to work (estimates hover around 85 percent), the middle school and high school years become critical to the transition process.
Beyond academics
There is no doubt that students with learning disabilities should master as many academic skills as possible (reading, writing, computing, and math) and learn about the myriad issues related to careers and the workplace. It is also during high school that other important competencies such as prevocational skills — time management, taking instructions from supervisors, and others — must be fully addressed, in order for the young person to be ready to navigate in the world beyond school, particularly in employment settings.
When an individual with learning disabilities makes the most of the transition process, successful job entry is the probable outcome. However, this initial stage of employment can only be successfully accomplished if the whole transition process is viewed as an interactive one among the young adult making the transition, his coworkers, and the employer.
Transition to employment must also be a process in which the responsibility for success chiefly falls on the young person with LD himself. So he needs to have a clear notion at all times of what to do, in order to be in control of the ever-changing circumstances of his world. Just as important, he needs to have a sense of how to adapt to the variety of work environments and diversity of tasks that present themselves in competitive employment. If these two competencies can be learned and used effectively, then there is a good likelihood that a young person will make a successful transition to employment.
Reframing disabilities
Without question, one of the mandatory elements of the transition process is for the young adult to come to grips with the learning disability itself — the learning disabilities literature call this reframing. Reframing involves a number of phases. First, the person with LD must have a clear understanding that he actually has a learning disability. That means that any issues of denial must be dealt with — for example, the belief that LD is "just a problem when I'm at school." Moreover, this acceptance infers that learning disabilities are real and will persist in the years past schooling, although they might take different forms in various adult contexts — including employment.
Second, in order to adjust to the workplace, a person with learning disabilities must develop a firm understanding of his profile of strengths, weaknesses, and challenges, beyond the basic psychological processes such as memory, processing, and organization. Moreover, the young person needs to know how to emphasize and celebrate his strengths, and deal with weaknesses using compensatory strategies, and tried-and-true accommodations such as calculators, spell checkers, and the like. With a self-inventory of strengths and weaknesses, the young person with LD should have the wherewithal to figure out how his learning disability will affect performance of job tasks and social interactions in the work environment. Most important, a young person must constantly work on a full understanding of his learning disability, as each task, interaction, and workday yields new information. In effect, understanding one's disability is an ongoing, ever-changing process.
Third, in order to deal effectively with his disability beyond the school years, a young person needs to have a healthy degree of acceptance of having an LD. He must accept it as a part of everyday life, which can emerge at any time, and which has to be dealt with in an efficient manner — for example, an inability to remember details, or difficulty with setting task priorities. Therefore, in order to compete, accomplish tasks, and succeed in employment and life, a young adult must accentuate his strengths and bypass or accommodate his weaknesses. Adults with learning disabilities say over and over again in interviews that once they accepted their learning disability and its challenges, they were freed up to take on the many demands of the workplace.
Adaptation in employment settings
The other challenge of successful transition is being adaptive to employment settings. It is important for a person with LD to be vigilant about orchestrating an environment where he can succeed — by either adapting himself to the work situation, making the work situation adaptive to him, or both. Individuals with LD need to be able to think creatively in order to alter work situations so they can perform more effectively and efficiently. For example, an alteration might be finding a quiet place to work, using computer software to help manage a task, or asking a colleague for assistance.
With self-knowledge about his learning disability, and a creative approach to adapting to the workplace, the young person can address the challenge of finding the best fit between himself and the work. Best fit means working in a job role that:
- one is interested in;
- allows use of one's strengths (with possibilities for reasonable accommodations for task challenges);
- provides a supportive supervisor and coworkers; and
- offers a work climate that is truly accepting of diversity.
Together, the ingredients listed above comprise a learning disabilities-friendly employment setting. In this kind of work environment, a person with LD can feel comfortable, be effective, and advance.
