Adult Autism & Employment – a guide and a conference from MU
Although the University of Missouri’s Disability Policy & Studies office doesn’t provide direct services to persons with disabilities, its many projects provide advice, training, and support to agencies and groups that do.
Mostly they provide advice and continuing education to counselors and service providers at agencies in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, but thanks to a new guide designed to help disability service providers do a better job and to Autism Works, an upcoming national conference on autism & employment, the rest of the country is now able to benefit from their studies.
Adult Autism & Employment: A guide for vocational rehabilitation professionals, written by MU School of Health Professions clinical associate professor Scott Standifer, suggests how to accommodate adults on the autism spectrum during employment services and in the workplace.
“Until now, there hasn’t been a resource available to employment service providers that is specific to autism and provides recommendations to help with the features of this growing population,” Standifer says. “This guide provides specific advice on a variety of employment issues for adults with ASD and, ultimately, helps the counselors find jobs for their clients.”
Autism Works will be Thursday & Friday, March 3 & 4, 2011, at the Sheraton Westport Hotel in St. Louis, MO. The conference will bring together the disability employment services community (vocational rehabilitation) and autism community to learn from each other and improve employment options for adults with autism. Topics will include: understanding the vocational rehabilitation (VR) process, what VR counselors need to know about autism, job development and work-place supports, funding possibilities for employment supports, and insights from working youth with autism.
Besides bridging the gap between vocational rehabilitation, one of the goals of the conference is to bring new voices into the discussion. Speakers will include Dan Tedesco, father of a child with autism and software developer who is busy building autism-specific iPhone applications; Joan Kester who provides technical assistance for voc rehab agencies and who is busy working on her dissertation on building communities of practice at George Washington University; Paul Andrew, who works for an agency that certifies disability employment service providers internationally, to assure they are doing person-centered, professional work; and Zosia Zaks via video link, a trained vocational rehabilitation counselor who has autism. As Standifer says, “She embodies the very connection we are trying to make with this conference.”
For more information on the Autism Works conference, go here: http://dps.missouri.edu/Autism/Announcement01.html
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