How to employ ability
While I was traveling into the office by bus on Wednesday morning, and most of my concentration was - as ever - dedicated to keeping myself sufficiently-firmly braced for sudden and unexpected braking not to result in hideous injury and six months off work, my eye was caught by a copy of which was fixed to a lamp post.
I was intrigued. I mean, you see a certain amount of worthy rhetoric here and there about employing disabled people being the socially-responsible thing to do. But it’s much rarer to see anyone pointing out that, far from being inherently frail and incompetent, disabled people have very often developed particular skills as a direct result of living with their impairments - skills which some of their non-disabled peers would give their eye teeth to have mastered.
This is a message I bang home relentlessly every year to the disabled undergraduates I speak to at Liverpool's universities. Got a PA? Then you already, before you’ve even graduated, have experience of managing staff. Can’t do things the same way the normies do? Bet your problem-solving skills are second to none. Got dyslexia? Every creative team would benefit from having a member with dyslexia: when you’re work-shopping solutions, you really need someone who thinks differently from the herd.
Anyway, imagine my surprise when I realised that the campaign is the brainchild of the DWP. (I’m sure I’m not the only person who reads Ouch who has learned over the years to be deeply suspicious of the DWP’s understanding of, and commitment to, disability equality issues.)
So I read on, expecting to wince at any moment. But you know what? It’s really not bad. I'm struggling to find anything at all with which to take major umbrage. I was particularly pleasantly-surprised by the calibre of their on talking to disabled people.
Of course, the big question is whether the campaign will have any impact on the hearts and minds of employers. That will probably depend on the way it’s marketed and the size of the budget which is earmarked for that marketing process. One small poster on a lamp post at the entrance to a railway station isn’t going to change the world, that’s for sure. But maybe that’s just the early outrider for a massive media campaign.
Well, it might ²ú±ð….
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Comments
Ture greatness from the DWP..... thats a bit of a shocker, considering the majority of the forms i have come across from them are not avalible in large print.
Lets just hope its the start of a massive advertising campain.
and you are so right about how having a disability gives you more skills for surviving through life, the other day i surprised somone with my ability to take notes on someone reading me a paragraph once. she was amazed because she had to go back over the paragraph and read it herself a copple more times, to get down all the information she needed, i just rememberd it. (to be honest i was slightly surprised too)
Lady Bracknell
This is exactly the point I was trying to make in my super human extra special blog.
/blogs/ouch/200709/super_human_extra_special.shtml
Having to manage a medical condition or disability gives us all sorts of extra skills.
Overcoming discrimination to get a job and succeeding is just one example of highly developed marketing skills.
All we need to do is to point this out to the employer with clever examples on the application form or on our CV.
Trouble is, with the stigma of mental illness, who would dare be so brave as to do so?
I work for a similar thing which gets people into work that have learning and physical disabilities or as we have called it "challenges".
I find it particularly good that places and charities like mine and others do a lot of good to employ disabled people and those with learning disabilities as they and us need work just as much as others.
whether the campaign will have any impact on the hearts and minds of employers remains to be be seen, but I am sure with guidance and support of us and campaigning, they will understand that disabled people have something to prove in a work environment.
It seems to me that lamp-post-mounted posters are a fairly random way of reaching decision makers and is unlikley to change their hearts and minds.
Perhaps somebody should ask DWP (Freedom of Information Act request?) exactly who they are aiming at and what their budget is for this, as they would have to answer.
I suspect that the budget is very large, the audience is very small and that they would be hard-pushed to justify their spending by measured results.
It could be that Katie Fraser could do more with the money than DWP.