Customized Employment
What Is Customized Employment?
Customized Employment is a strategy that creates access to individualized, integrated, community-based employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities and other significant barriers to employment. Customized Employment cultivates unique knowledge of both employment seekers and employers, and creates the opportunity to closely match the skills, talents, and interests of one with the business and workforce needs of the other.
Customized Employment is:
Person Centered: the individual employment seeker is the focus of Customized Employment, and the primary source of direction and inspiration in the process.
Strengths Driven: rather than relying on standard assessments and tests, Customized Employment identifies the individual’s strengths, and uses those strengths as the foundation of their career search.
Individually Responsive: Customized Employment prioritizes each individual and their distinct employment-related needs and goals, to ensure that no one is excluded or unserved.
Consistent with values of integrated, inclusive, full wage and community-based employment for all.
Customized Employment creates employment positions based on the interests, contributions, and ideal conditions of successful employment for the employment seekers, and the unmet needs of the employer. Through detailed planning, negotiation with employer, and provision of systemic instruction during on the onboarding and training period, Customized Employment ensures that the needs of both the employer and employment seeker are met.
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Customized Employment is especially valuable, and often necessary, for individuals with the most significant barriers to employment. It is a universal strategy that can support employers and career seekers in most hiring scenarios. For individuals who may not previously have considered customized or competitive employment, or whose experience is limited, Customized Employment creates the opportunity to identify and apply their strengths, interests, conditions for successful employment, and potential contributions to the employment search in a way the standard job development does not allow.
For families who have not previously considered employment as an option, Customized Employment places the individuals and their family “in the driver’s seat”. The process is flexible to the needs and preferences of the individual and their family, and proceeds in the direction that is most fitting for them.
During the Customized Employment process it is important to provide opportunities for consultation with a Work Incentives and disability benefits counselor, to allow individuals and families to take into account the benefits they receive - and may wish or need to continue to receive – to ensure that employment does not disrupt necessary insurance coverage or other support.
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Students in transition from school to work benefit greatly from strategies like Discovery and Customized Employment, that are designed to support employment-seekers with limited work histories to determine their goals, interests, and potential contributions to an employer. The Customized Plan for Employment that is developed from the student’s goals, interests, and potential contributions identified in Discovery can be included in the student’s Individual Employment Plan (IEP).
Customized Employment helps students in transition learn about and consider their career choices. By maintaining a person-driven and employment-outcome focused approach, Customized Employment ensures that students in transition will establish themselves in competitive employment, rather than cultivating an ongoing reliance on services and benefits.
Educators and transition specialists further benefit by having another tool that works for every student they serve. Customized Employment is not a test that the student can fail, it is process that builds on their unique strengths and interests, toward sustainable employment success. The Customized Employment process provides a blueprint and a plan that gives the student and their family a process for thinking about employment. And, by involving families, peers, and other contacts in the student’s life, Customized Employment provides a constructive means by which to rally the support of the people in the student’s life.
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Customized Employment has the unique potential to support all employment seekers to gain competitive, integrated, employment. For federal and state agencies whose mandate is to serve individuals with the most significant barriers, and whose outcomes are driven by the success of the providers they fund, Customized Employment is a necessary element of the services that should be available in every state and locality. Providers who offer Customized Employment and systematic instruction services are able to expand access to employment and increase the value and benefit that they provide to individuals with disabilities and their families.
MG&A’s rigorous certification process further ensures that staff deliver these services to the highest possible standard of quality, and that services will have a consistent approach and philosophy across agencies and areas. MG&A training and consultation services can further support state and federal agency staff to understand how best to deploy these services, and how to maximize its value for the individuals supported through their agency.
““I believe that Customized Employment expands your professional skills while also providing an opportunity for many Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities who may not have been considered for employment in the past but still deserve a chance to find integrated employment.” ”
MG&A’s Approach
MG&A offers a range of training, certification, and technical assistance services in support of increasing the availability of state-of-the art Customized Employment services:
Gateway Training that results in an ACRE Certificate of completion in Employment Services with an Emphasis on Customized Employment. MG&A also offers a similar Gateway training in Systematic Instruction.
MG&A Performance Based Certification takes the knowledge that was learned in the Gateway Trainings and puts it to use, through supported practice in the field. MG&A Mentors work closely with new practitioners to guide them in their first experience implementing Discovery, Customized Job Development, and Systematic Instruction.
Technical Assistance, Tailored Training, and Individualized Support meet the unique needs of agencies and organizations.
We welcome the opportunity to talk with you regarding training, certification, and technical assistance consultation that we offer, to support your organization in the provision and expansion of CE and inclusive employment and community services.