Peter Altschul: Close Trust Gap, Advance Employment With Joint Training

Summary:
Peter Altschul, Reuters diversity coordinator, believes advancing employment opportunities for people who are blind needs to start with a dialogue among prospective employees and employers.

Defining and Examining the Gap

Part of the Solution

We Are the First Generation

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Defining and Examining the Gap

Skim the surface about employment among people who are blind, and you won't know what to think. People who are blind say that, no matter what they do, no employer will give them a fair shot at a job. Employers say they are ready and willing to hire qualified people with disabilities, but they don't know where to find them.

There seem to be gaps between what people say and what is fact. Without reliable and verifiable statistics about the employment of people with visual impairments, we're left with only anecdote and speculation.

Are people who are blind really becoming qualified for work in today's job market and applying for those jobs? Then employers are being disingenuous when they say they can't find them. Are employers really actively seeking job candidates who are blind? Then blind people are just complaining to complain.

My own mind keeps coming back to two images:

• My own experience with having an executive director's whole demeanor and tone change when she found out that I -- up until then a golden candidate -- was visually impaired.
  
  
• The only other people with visual impairments (besides myself) at a disability job fair were a couple who were blind. They were casually dressed, strolling, idle and seemed unmotivated.
  
  

Which image reveals the true nature of this divide between prospective employees with visual impairments and prospective employers?

Neither group probably has the corner on accuracy; neither is entirely off the mark. While nodding with recognition towards the efforts of those who have in the past achieved so much for the welfare of people with disabilities, we can also probably consider ourselves as members of the first generation of blind and visually impaired people to actively seek full and equal integration into all areas of normal adult life. Like any other vanguard civil rights movement, we are caught between the dis-empowered and the impatient generations. We are the ones who must, at the same time, educate both the "oppressors" and the "oppressed." We are the ones who recognize that employers are, in fact, still largely uneducated and reluctant and that other people within the visually impaired community our age and younger are largely ill-prepared and unwilling to accept the first few entry-level opportunities for competitive work open to us.

Clearly our true mission, then, is to lay the groundwork for those after us who will need to work together to create equal opportunity. Like settlers, we clear the trees, pull out the stumps and break the ground for our children's future, perhaps ourselves never quite seeing the bounty of the land.

Peter Altschul is an extremely thoughtful and articulate man with a varied and impressive background in human resources, conflict management and community mediation, training, and other aspects of integration that together are helping to shape today's inclusive workplace practices. Because he is brilliant, he has achieved much in his life. Because he is blind, it has been a difficult and circuitous journey.

Altschul, who is the diversity coordinator for the Reuters News and Wire Service's editorial and branch staff, is also a very active and respected member of several online discussion groups focused on disabilities and employment. His multi-directional observations about blindness and employment challenges led me to ask him how to address and eliminate the prospective employee/prospective employer gap within the visually impaired community.

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Part of the Solution

Altschul outlined the efforts we must foster if those who succeed us will have better access to satisfying and gainful work.

Starting with Children

"The Child is father of the Man."
- The Rainbow, William Wordsworth

It is never too late to improve your options, but, as Wordsworth, the poet, indicates, what a child learns can and does influence him throughout his life. Limitations, both external and internalized, can bind the progress of a child who is blind. "Many parents don't let blind kids have a normal range of life experiences, so they never know what they can do," says Altschul.

By overprotecting blind children or insisting others cut them extra slack, a parent stunts the growth of personal responsibility that Altschul says is the key to a blind person's success as an adult and in a career. Lacking the typical challenges and triumphs of childhood, a child who is blind can grow up without developing self-confidence and become the man who lacks that essential quality.

Guiding Young Feet

Similarly, public schools often fail to challenge young minds when the minds are not accompanied by a sharp sense of sight. Often, the child is not expected to be resourceful and find his own adaptations. Altschul explains this is at least partly true because accommodations requirements are generally much stricter for schools than for employers.

Altschul remembers hearing a blind high school student boast that he was the only blind person in his school who was using an electronic Braille note taker instead of relying on a volunteer to take notes for him. Altschul, who points out this over-compensatory accommodation is common in colleges, too, was shocked that those at the school seemed not to know that there are many ways, not all of them high tech or expensive, that a blind person can use to acquire his own study skills.

Ironically (and to be fair because of budget and teacher supply limitations) the schools which go overboard with accommodations for blind children fail to provide them with one tool that is almost universally needed: Braille training. "Some people can read large print, but most blind people would do well to learn how to use Braille," asserts Altschul, who assumes that any competent employee will use all the resources and tools at his disposal. "Speech output -- at least at this point -- can't do everything," he says. "Braille is statistically a skill of successful blind career people."

Altschul also recommends that employers begin to guide the career choices of youth with visual impairments and other disabilities in junior high and high school. "It amazed me once to find out, on a tour of a large corporate headquarters, that even many of the graduate students preparing to work in that industry had never set foot in the lobby."

"Blind youth need to hear about all the careers there are," he explains. "And they need to have communicated to them that these career choices are open to them and how to start preparing (for them), if we ever want blind people to be qualified for many scientific, technical and other careers."

Working With Colleges

Altschul believes that the approach taken in college to accommodate students with visual impairments actually handicaps them when they start to work. "The sorts of things colleges do -- the extra time given for term papers, for instance -- don't reflect, don't prepare them for what expectations the students will face in employment."

Part of accommodating disabled college students, he says, must be preparing them for the lack of special allowances employers will offer. Both public school and post-secondary education needs to foster resourcefulness and self-reliance. "People need help, of course," Altschul continues, "but not so much (that) they can't help themselves. We need to find where the line is."

He also points out that there is a double message for college students with disabilities when, on one hand, they receive so much help but, on the other hand, are subtly or even overtly discouraged from pursuing specialties or advanced degrees. I told Altschul about a Canadian friend of mine who was told two weeks before graduation that the college had decided no one would hire a blind teacher and refused to award her a teaching certificate. Altschul responded, "This is not terribly new. Women, (for instance), have long been discouraged to enter science and mathematics. Its message doesn't have to be that obvious to be effective. You just make it clear that these subjects are not for women. It's difficult to have to redouble one's struggle to overcome that."

High tech, scientific and other technical industries would do well to communicate to colleges that they expect to find disabled as well as non-disabled job seekers among their graduates in those fields.

Both small and large employers can start in high school with informational talks and fairs about the careers available within their fields. They can sponsor job shadowing and similar attempts to inform young blind people about the world of options. They can also continue those efforts in college but step up the support and encouragement by providing more detailed information about careers in their fields and by offering opportunities for internships.

Those internships must be "real," Altschul emphasizes. He says Reuters gives interns real assignments and real work. "Interns here have done some great news reporting and writing that made it into the mainstream media." Only real work will prepare an intern for a career.

On the Job

In addition to offering real-work internships, employers must commit to hiring and promoting job candidates who have a disability. "They know how to do this," Altschul points out. "They've been doing a good job with recruiting for diversity. They know how to go out and get the best women and minority candidates. They need to do the same with disabled people."

Like other under-represented groups, disabled students can benefit from mentorships with people in different fields. The mentors encourage them, inform them of the variety of careers available, guide their educational choices, introduce them to the real work environment and help them make connections.

"The companies should do this with all students -- not just disabled ones," Altschul explains.

But the disability community, like other "diversity" groups, has another, even more difficult inclusion issue to tackle: gaining promotions when once on the job. "Companies lose great minority employees when they don't put as much energy into these employees' career development," Altschul states. "When they realize, or even just perceives, they are at a dead end -- that the company they work for will not promote them, that they won't have a career -- they burn out. I've seen a lot of blind people who figure out pretty quickly they aren't going anywhere -- no matter how hard they work or how good they are."

"Another problem," he continues, "is that, for the most part, diversity training is dreadful. They either do happy talk or lecture. Inclusion really is about conflict resolution, understanding different points of view and approaches. Resolving the differences. Companies need to look into this more pragmatic and realistic solution, if they want a diverse workplace."

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We Are the First Generation

I have described Altschul's prescription for those who support and guide blind people into adulthood and careers, but what do people who are blind themselves need to do?

Essentially, we need to learn to think and act like any other job seeker. We need to reject over-protective relationships and policies. We need to find out how to do things in a way that builds autonomy. We need to take responsibility rather than expect to have things done for us or provided for us. The realities of life demand it. Even if we are "entitled," we should say, "Thanks, but no thanks" whenever we can. Altschul believes that the existing rehabilitation system is hurting, not helping, disabled people's chances at equality. "They don't challenge people," he asserts. "They don't encourage them. And they don't teach, or sometimes even model, self-reliance."

As blind and partially sighted people we need to break ourselves of the habit of helplessness. How will we ever convince the general public that people who are blind can be doctors and lawyers and President, if they continue to see us on street corners begging for change? Or less drastic, if they see us sullenly and reluctantly working in customer-contact, entry-level jobs. We will be rejected time and again.

We must fearlessly examine ourselves to see in what ways we are acting to unwittingly perpetuate the stereotypes we want to abolish. Do we, like Carlin's character, intentionally set ourselves up to fail? Our challenges are sufficient -- we don't need to manufacture more.

We need to take the initiative in finding out what careers are out there, what we need to achieve to gain them and then to be, well, "model blind people." This is the role the first generation always must take. "For every entry level job we accept, a blind person down the road will get a better job," Altschul promises. We clear the way. We are the trailblazers, the pioneers.

The barriers are not insignificant. Altschul sums them up nicely: "Blind people don't trust corporations because they hear the grandiose talk but know individuals who have direct experience that the talk is hollow. And corporations don't trust the disabled people because they don't know what they can do and whether they will take the jobs seriously."

Concludes Altschul, "Really, the most exciting thing I have ever seen is joint training. Instead of training disabled people how to do well in interviews and training interviewers how to interview blind people, get them together. Get them talking. They'll learn more from each other and build stronger relationships. The disabled people will learn the corporation really wants them, and the corporations will find out just who disabled people are. They can both find reasons to trust. Until we see advancing disabled employment as a mutual task, we will always be blaming the other guy."

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