Iowa Workforce Development-Vocational Rehabilitation Services — 2024 Catalysts Honoree
Settings; For Success
Iowa Workforce Development Vocational Rehabilitation Services provides expert, individualized services to Iowans with disabilities so they can achieve their independence through successful employment and economic support. They want to help every person who seeks employment find it.
At the 2024 Catalysts Live event on July 18th, Tyler Hansen, CESP, business engagement manager, and April Stotz, MS, CRC, training manager & tech liaison, shared more about the organization’s purpose and commitment to all Iowans.
If an individual living with a disability wants to work, they should be able to.
Oftentimes, they just need access to tools and accommodations necessary to do the job.
This was the highlight of Iowa Workforce Development Vocational Rehabilitation Services’ talk at the 2024 Catalysts Live event. The organization helps those with disabilities gain, keep and advance in their employment.
To help paint the picture, Tyler Hansen, business engagement manager at Vocational Rehabilitation Services, quoted Steve Jobs, who once said, “It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.”
Hansen shared the story of one individual they recently worked with. This person had cerebral palsy and lived full-time in a facility. She was wheelchair bound and lacked fine motor skills, but she wanted to work. The job she was given, though, was to move a nut from one side of the table to the other. This was not meaningful for her.
What was important to her was making an impact on the community. She wasn’t able to do that with the devices she had.
That’s where Vocational Rehabilitation Services stepped in.
The organization helped provide her with a power wheelchair, which gave her more independence. Then she was given a communications device from a company called Tobii Dynavox, which manufactures speech generating devices.
With this piece of technology, she was able to write children’s books — a goal she had had for a long time but wasn’t able to do without the support of assistive communication. Today, she has four published books under her belt, all of which share messages of how individuals with disabilities are all around us.
This is just one of many stories from Vocational Rehabilitation Services, but it highlights just how much technology can impact those living with disabilities.
Hansen and his colleague, April Stotz, training manager and tech liaison, went on to show a slide deck sharing examples of accommodations and assistive technology for people with disabilities. On each slide, there were also pictures of extremely successful celebrities who live with disabilities.
But we don’t know them by their disabilities.
The first slide discussed tools aligned with self-care, like technology for remote working, virtual job coaches and modified vehicles that enable people to get to work independently.
Then Hansen and Stotz shared about work tolerance and work skills, or the ability to handle physical and psychological stressors of work and learn new tasks. Tools that can be used for accommodations include ergonomic workstations and automation. They also discussed dictation, or speech to text. This helps with people with dexterity struggles but is also used across the workforce at Vocational Rehabilitation Services. The organization has found that dictation actually makes all their employees more efficient, because most can talk faster than they can type.
In fact, Stotz pointed out that individualized accommodations and solutions can also be universal solutions for staff members. These types of things can help reduce workman compensation injuries, too.
Hansen then highlighted celebrities like Tom Cruise, who has dyslexia. His job is to understand and memorize scripts, so he uses audio recordings of the script to do so. Samuel L. Jackson has a speech impediment, so he uses filler words to his brain process.
These strategies align with tools that Vocational Rehabilitation Services uses for interpersonal skills and comprehension accommodations, like Tobii Dynavox, screen readers and amplification devices, such as hearing aids.
Ultimately, focusing on a person’s abilities and not their disabilities will help with creating impactful solutions in the workplace.
Stotz and Hansen wrapped their presentation up by playing a video clip of Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist who lived with ALS.
Although my body is very limited, my mind is free to explore the universe.
Businesses can reach out to Vocational Rehabilitation Services for free. They’re ready to help solve your business challenges and support successful employment for Iowans with disabilities.
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