Looking Back to Go Forward

We’ve started the process of evolving our Discovery and Customised Employment programs to reflect the growing evidence base from practice and research. Recent discussions with pioneers and practitioners highlighted the need for employment professionals to understand the history of disability employment and the nuances that can’t be found in written material. I’ve always sought out the authors of material to understand the nuance and intent of their works which gives true meaning to what is written. That’s the key to professional practice is subtlety and nuance. Trevor Parmenter and Roy Brown commented that unless you knew the history and built on it, you’re just spinning your wheels.?

With that in mind, one of the points we’re highlighting is that Customised Employment and Discovery just didn’t appear – the terms did, but the practices were built on the back of what was happening more broadly in disability employment, a point that Cary Griffin highlighted in one of our recorded discussions. It also just didn’t happen in the USA, it was happening more broadly across the globe and what is forgotten is that just like today, the global community shares ideas and bounces off each other. It is part of the reason why we have global alliances and share resources and ideas with our colleagues.

Here's a snippet of what’s coming with the evolution of our Discovery and CE material.

The History of Discovery

No discussion about Discovery is complete unless you understand the origins of Customised Employment. Discovery is the underpinning practice of Customised Employment and today we also use Discovery to underpin the use of Individual Place and Support by non-mental health professionals who work with clients with mental illness in community settings.?

In a similar vein, it’s important to remember that while our focus is on the person-centred process of Discovery, it is one part of the larger movement away from segregation and institutionalisation that was starting to gain momentum in the mid to late last century. Both deinstitutionalisation and integrated employment are still on that journey with neither anywhere near the end. Bellamy, Rhodes, Mank and Albin (1988)?wrote that open employment would only be possible when paid employment with the correct support in community settings occurred. No one would suggest that we have achieved that outcome with any degree of fidelity.

Innovation in disability employment has a long history of research and application that could be argued is characteristically incremental rather than the product of a big bang. In 1986 Bellamy, Rhodes, and Albin?wrote that combining employment and support represented a new direction that heightened the responsibilities of employment professionals that in a way represented the idea of taking a holistic approach to employment. Work with the whole person, not just focus on employment. This is the approach that the Centre for Disability Employment Research and Practice (CDERP) takes with its Work First Program.

At the same time, they discussed the construct of measuring employment outcomes across the broader impact on the individual, not simply hours and wages earned. The fact that I proposed and have been developing an outcome measure (Personalised Inclusive Employment Outcome Measure – PIEOM) that proposes the same thing since 2018 suggests that we still haven’t progressed in our construct of measuring the success of employment support programs beyond simple placement hours and dollars earned.