|
State wants to open employment doors for the disabled
by Heather B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
April 2007
It’s hard to find good employees in a state where the unemployment rate hovers around 3 percent. But Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and off-icials at the Virginia Board for People with Disabilities (VBPD) hope that an initiative designed to place some disabled people in state government positions will encourage companies to consider hiring from a largely untapped pool of workers.
The disabled represent “a group of potential employees that a lot of companies just don’t think to look into,” says John Driscoll, marketing and planning manager for VBPD. “And they not only don’t think to look there, they don’t
even realize just how productive and loyal these employees
can be.”
The initiative calls for a two-year, $244,000 state
grant to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rehabilitation and Research Center. The money will be used to train rehabilitation professionals
to identify job opportunities for the disabled, develop
referral procedures, recruit applicants and place them
in temporary jobs that could become permanent positions.
“Temporary employment is an excellent gateway or door opener for permanent employment,” says Driscoll, noting that his agency has handled similar, smaller grants in previous years. “We have found that once employers take this route and they realize that they’re getting dependable, hardworking, productive em-ployees, it’s just really easy for them to make the transition to including the disabled in their full-time hiring.”
The goal of the initiative is to place at least 20 disabled people in permanent state positions. The larger objective, however, “is to get the right people trained, build the relationships and then be able to show some real-world examples that are successful,” Driscoll says. |
