Employment of young people with intellectual disabilities: facilitating conditions for inclusive employment

Our starting point will be our specific realities as support services for people with ID. Taking into account the methodologies that every partner is applying in their everyday work, we are going to develop a new methodology for accompanying young people with ID from specialized support services to a real inclusion in their communities developing a professional activity.
On one hand, this process needs to address the training of professionals working in support services. Training will focus on: (1) methodologies for developing autonomy and transversal skills, (2) methodologies for supported employment, and (3) work-based learning strategies. These professionals will accompany young people with ID through the work inclusion process, supporting the development of a working identity based on individual needs, preferences and possibilities.
On the other hand, this project expects to actively involve the close environment of young people with ID, understood as the family, the community, and the potential employers. Information and dissemination strategies together with an awareness campaign, will be the focus of this part of the project. We plan to generate a dissemination campaign, creating videos and written information following the principles of the “design for all” paradigm. Public and private local networks will be used to spread the campaign.
Summarizing, this project addresses training and development of key competences of professionals to promote employability of young people with ID. Documentation of the process will result in a set of multilingual accessible manuals approaching the topic of accompanying the process for work inclusion from institutions (support and care services) to the workplace. Two complementary manuals will answer the following questions: (1) How can I identify the specific and context-related barriers hindering employment of young people with ID in my organization? and (2) How can I deal with these barriers?
These manuals will reply with some ideas and suggestions taken from our specific contexts, that can be generalized to our different European realities, and summarized in two main aspects:
Vocational Educational Training of Professionals from the ID Sector:
Person-centered support, learning potential, development of transversal skills.
Development of working identity and career planning.
Supported employment methodologies.
Dissemination, exploitation and network reinforcement:
Involvement of families
Community networking: finding support and resources in the community
Dissemination and awareness campaign targeted at potential employers. This campaign will address available options of supported employment as well as information on taxes, social and interpersonal benefits of hiring young people with ID.