Mapping a Way to Success – A Career Counselling Perspective on Learning Disabilities

by Sheila Mulhern and Peter Rattan

Mapping a Way to Success – A Career Counselling Perspective on Learning Disabilities

Learning

1 a: the act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill. b: Knowledge or skill gained through schooling or study. c: Behavioural modification especially through experience or conditioning. *

Disability

1 a: a disadvantage or deficiency, especially a physical or mental impairment that interferes with or prevents normal achievement in particular area. b: something that hinders or incapacitates. *

“Learning.” “Disability.” Paired together, these words seem to contradict one another, especially considering their definitions. On their own, their meanings are very simple to understand. Why is it, then, that so many people have difficulty understanding what a learning disability is especially the ones who can make a difference or influence the lives of those affected.

For Career Counsellors, it is always a challenge to assist people with their decisions about a new path or the next steps in their career. Add a disability, such as a learning disability or learning challenge, to this life-altering decision (which may already be a major stressor for most people), and decisions about your career become so much more intimidating.

How do you help someone who is not sure how to help himself or herself? How do you help someone who has never tasted the thrill of success to discover his or her strengths?

School is often considered a playground for life. It is supposed to prepare you for entering the working world. Remember acing a test in school? Or hearing an audience’s applause after performing in a school play or delivering a speech? Or winning a prize in an athletic competition? Or having a teacher smile at you for making an effort?

Remember how success and pride felt? For a moment, imagine if you’d never had any of those experiences. Imagine never knowing what it felt like to be proud of yourself for a job well done in an environment based on success or failure. Beyond all of that, imagine having a limit on your goals, achievements, and expectations set down by those who are supposed to dare you to dream, reach higher levels, and strive to maximize your potential.

Compound this with psychological challenges, inadequate or negligent parents, traumatic childhood, abuse or any number of life-altering experiences. Life would be pretty hard. For those people, finding and keeping a job feels like an insurmountable challenge.

If small successes lead to greater successes, then we must create environments where people can experience the feeling of accomplishment and the satisfaction of a job well done. How do we create more opportunities for the person to experience feeling of competence, growth, and change- while preparing our clients for the realities of the working world?

Outreach to employers, teachers, parents, friends, family and peers, the list goes on and on.

We work extremely hard at ALDER to prepare out clients for success. We believe the sessions and career counselling must fit the individual client. If a client cannot read, we read for them or provide adaptive technology to assist them, or recommend appropriate remediation.

If a client has a poor short-term memory, we provide written summaries of counselling sessions, reminders of next steps by email, or highlight information in different colours. If a client has anger management concerns, addiction, childhood trauma, or any number of secondary barriers to employment, we partner with the appropriate professional agency or bridge the client with the agency. We have to be creative and cater the individual accommodations within the counselling session to the client.

For example, an adult client of ALDER’s, who had very little work experience, but fabulous ideas and strong verbal skills, was feeling frustrated in the career planning stage. The client had about a million dream jobs to pursue but no focus. Because he had exhibited high potential but had always had poor performances in traditional settings, this client could not focus on realistic goals before reaching for the stars towards completely unrealistic goals. Rather than simply informing this client it was a pipe dream to think he would be a movie star or an astronaut we tried a creative approach: we dreamed. To assist with memory and visual skills, we posted all the dream jobs and realistic jobs along with corresponding pros and cons all around the counselling office on large pieces of paper and marked important points with neon highlighters. Through dialogue and humour, we slowly eliminated unrealistic jobs and found a down-to-earth goal with what was left hanging on the wall. The process of dreaming, accommodating the space visually and actively engaging in dialogue brought what the client was looking for: focus.

Some other ideas for accommodating clients with learning disabilities is to given the clients the opportunity to start a task and continue, uninterrupted, until completion before taking on another task and encouraging clients to develop a step-by-step checklist that can be followed. Asking the client, do you own a watch? Do you use an alarm clock? Do you use a calendar or day timer? If not, then assist your client in accessing and becoming familiar with these tools. Becoming hyper-organized is sometimes the only way around memory and learning challenges.

A tape recorder and cassette can make a world of difference as a memory aid to review sessions. Having access to adaptive technology takes the accommodations one step further, for example a personal organizer equipped with voice recognition and speech output could be considered. This allows verbal instructions to be recorded, stored and converted to a text format on a computer. Accessing such a technical aid would guarantee that all instructions or verbal information are accurately recorded for future reference.

At the end of the day, all the staff at ALDER is prepared to try new approaches and work in ways that surprise even us. There is no one book or piece of advice on how to help a person with a learning disability, our experience demonstrates that clinical knowledge mixed with creativity and patience are the most important tools we need when working with our clients. The unique and talented individuals we work with continue to show the infinite options available to people with multiple challenges.

* Dictionary definitions obtained from Websters Dictionary

This article originally appeared in Learning Curves, April 2004.  It has been updated and rewritten for the Contact Point Spring 2005 Bulletin.

Sheila Mulhern (sheila@aldercentre.org) and Peter Rattan (peter@aldercentre.org) are Career Counsellors with ALDER (Adult Learning Disabilities Employment Resources ). For more information on ALDER, call 416-693-2922). For additional information on learning disabilities, visit www.ldao.ca.