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It's Learning Disabilities Week! Share your experiences of looking for work
LiamO_Dell
Member Posts: 1,114 Pioneering
Monday 19 June to Sunday 25 June 2017 is Learning Disabilities Week!
Every year, the event raises awareness of people with learning disabilities and touches upon a different topic. For 2017, the theme is 'employment'.
It's an important theme too, because at the moment, fewer than 2 in 10 working age people with learning disabilities are in work!
So how can you get involved? Well, you can find out more about Learning Disabilities Week on Mencap's website, as well as via the Twitter hashtag, #LDWeek17.
As this year's theme is employment, we'd like to know: What are your experiences of finding a job as someone with learning disabilities? Do you have any advice, hints or tips? What can employers do to help?
Leave a comment with your thoughts below...
Every year, the event raises awareness of people with learning disabilities and touches upon a different topic. For 2017, the theme is 'employment'.
It's an important theme too, because at the moment, fewer than 2 in 10 working age people with learning disabilities are in work!
So how can you get involved? Well, you can find out more about Learning Disabilities Week on Mencap's website, as well as via the Twitter hashtag, #LDWeek17.
As this year's theme is employment, we'd like to know: What are your experiences of finding a job as someone with learning disabilities? Do you have any advice, hints or tips? What can employers do to help?
Leave a comment with your thoughts below...
Liam
Replies
Senior online community officer
They even went as far as breaking the law as well. (Equalities Act 2010, reasonable adjustments)
Senior online community officer
In the end I got signed off sick and put on to ESA. On the day that I received a letter telling me I was put into the support group, they (work programme) phoned me to ask if I wanted "help" getting back into work. I declined their offer. I then had to ask the job centre to politely ask the work programme to leave me alone.
I tried to involve my MP. He happened to be an ambassador for them!
He is, from everything that happened with PIP, generally useless.
I accept that medication can be useful and indeed lifesaving, across a very broad field of illness and wellness, but for me its psychiatric value has been overplayed because of financial and social expediency and thus forms part of an oppressive threat potentially. Literally am the Looney Left, and does it qualify for DLA? Though I might also ask rhetorically, does refraining from claiming help me with the Daily Mail/Sun reading and ultra conservatism types?
There's been job courses available as family support service user and carer and I know of things locally that are available. Inam afraid they won't fit. That it's full of prejudices about intelligence and coping and the struggling and full of an engrained make do type sensibility because I might have to shoot the moon or find an alternative lifrstyle path but theyre looking atbconvrntional job roles and trying to avoid conflict or disappointmenylt. And that's seemingly hard for me.
My aunty who works in voluntary sector at a MH focussed CVS and (she was a Community Transport manager as I was growing up) recommended Remploy. I still haven't got in touch.
Support services were difficult because I kinda knew the people, not personally before but there's a sensibility I am familiar with. But they didn't know how to help me. I think I'm an unfamiliar awkward combination of things, and a socially concerned rebel who knows the ropes though not thoroughly and lacks muscle and coordination and perhaps gumption to climb them consistently though if you do get me you should be able to help me. And it doesn't feel like its entirely impossible. But I am (cheesy cliche to often said though it is) not a usual kind of client. Were a mostly undiagnosed mostly "high functioning" (this is some misnomer because problems are similar whatever level of verbal and "IQ" skill you have), autistic polymath politicised family, plus a child with a brain injury and cortical VI from GBS neonatal sepsis who does very well considering.
Another reason I struggle with the idea of employment is not wanting to be a cog in the machine. And also having done the "sensible" thing and picked up a job in a supermarket for a while anyway I didn't cope.
Not with the intensity and the combo of coordination, mental skills and people. And not with the thing where they asked for feedback about safety and environment things but didn't listen at all, to stuff that seemed frightening, crucial and basic to me. Meanwhile pressured managers slapped you down for worrying about customers' health and if you were sick and taking time off. Struggling single mums that needed to be well were bullied into not resting when they needed to. The "soft touch" people that were ill came in feeling bad, one person had lost their voice and sat on checkouts with a sign round their necks. Meanwhile others did throw sickies. Survival of the thickest-skinned. Nothing meritorious about it.
It was all together pretty traumatic and off putting. I got quite poorly.
Can't have access to work without workplaces that are decent to everybody.
Guess my diagnosis,
It may help, but
Don't guess my kids's
Guess my diagnosis,
It may help, but
Don't guess my kids's
Guess my diagnosis,
It may help, but
Don't guess my kids's