Back to Work With a Disability
Deciding how to get back into the work force with a disability can be a challenge. Though it is illegal to discriminate, you can help reassure nervous employers of your capacity to do the job with some skills and career-focused training.
Certain fields can be very friendly to different sorts of disability. For example, payroll training or even medical support roles that take advantage of your existing familiarity with healthcare can be excellent gateways to fulfilling careers.
Physical Handicaps
Mobility restrictions that come with a physical handicap can make a lot of work seem daunting. You’re often not in a position to stand for hours and for most people in this sort of situation, lifting objects is just not an option. Office work is generally helpful for many disabilities, and will require minimal accommodations. An ergonomic chair, or a desk placed at the height of your wheel chair may be more than enough.
Landing a job, however, can take a little extra education, even for an entry level role. A good example of this is payroll training. So long as you have earned the proper certification and are computer literate, there is no reason an employer won’t be able to get as much work from you as an able bodied person.
Similarly, paralegal training will put you back to work in a law office. You won’t even have to worry about reaching heavy law books for your research as legal archives are increasingly digitised.
Perceptual Handicaps
Working with computers may be especially conducive to what you need because there have been great strides in disability accommodating software. Similarly, with the right display your dyslexia should be no barrier to payroll or paralegal training, while a text to speech system would help the visually impaired.
Mental Health Handicaps
Increasingly, disabilities are recognized to include forms of mental illness. They may not harm your ability to function as far as body motion or perception, but even if your condition is in remission or active treatment, you may still have to take it into account when job hunting. Something to consider: personal support worker or PSW courses, or other in demand medical support careers. PSW courses prepare you for a career, which even if it’s physical, is in such demand that you can have more flexibility regarding hours. Generally you will also want to look for less stressful environments because stress is a known exacerbation of mental health conditions of all kinds.
Regardless of your choice and the disability you have to work with, there will be something for everyone. Some schools even have disabilities accommodations or even a method of teaching ideal for people with a particular disability. For example a hearing impaired student will gain more from a curriculum delivered in a purely reading format. With the right accommodations there’s no reason you can’t enjoy a full life.
About the Author:
Visit Algonquin Careers Academy for more information on classes such as payroll training.
Valeria Stephens is a Copywriter at Higher Education Marketing, a leading Web marketing firm specializing in Google Analytics, Education Lead Generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Mobile SMS Alerts, Social Media Marketing and Pay Per Click Marketing, among other web marketing services and tools.