As a disability employment expert, I help people gain the confidence they need for putting disability to work as their competitive advantage.

I serve job seekers with a disability, career coaches with clients who have a disability, and disability friendly employers as well as parents who are raising children with disabilities.

With 45 years of business experience (10 of them at the vice presidential level for a Fortune 500 company) and lifelong cerebral palsy, I've accumulated the best ways to approach employment from a disability perspective.

I wish what I know now I had in my back pocket when I started looking for a job as a new college grad with a disability.

As a Global Career Development Facilitator (GCDF) and Accredited Business Communicator (ABC, I now believe both job seekers with a disability and employers with savvy can put disability to work as a competitive edge in today's business world.

For job seekers, framing disability as an asset involves these five steps:

1.      Writing personal-experience stories to document accomplishments.

2.      Identifying key success factors that bubble up from stories of accomplishment.

3.      Defining the personal skills and attributes which underlie those key success factors.

4.      Showing how managing a disability helped to develop those skills and attributes.

5.      Branding those disability-honed skills and attributes as workplace advantages.

For employers, hiring a qualified, motivated individual with a disability can be a work-team and corporate-wide benefit because he or she is probably ready to:

1.      Apply unusually high levels of perseverance to a workplace setting.

2.      Deal effectively with the ambiguity of today’s business climate.

3.      Foster a team’s problem-solving abilities through a long-term focus.

4.      Build a work team’s ability to be agile and innovative when faced with challenge.

5.      Add to a work team’s strength, talent, resiliency and duration.

For more detail about how I approach disability employment as a career development facilitator, see my two books and my forum.

 
         Jim Hasse, ABC, GCDF, Owner

         Hasse Communication Counseling
       Put Disability to Work as Your Competitive Edge

www.linkedin.com/in/jimhasse

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         Compiler and Editor of
                      Perfectly Able

                   How to Attract and Hire
                  Talented People with Disabilities
      Published by American Management Association
         www.perfectlyable.com

         ”Timely Tips for Retaining Employee Talent”
         forum.perfectlyable.com