engleski

Employability of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

Frequent unemployment of persons with intellectual disabilities is a big problem which questions the point of the whole habilitation and rehabilitation of persons with disabilities. Consequently, it is obvious that measures must be taken to effectively increase employment chances for persons with disabilities ; and to determine more precisely what these measures should be, it is necessary to detect real problems, that is, obstacles. Having in mind this goal, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched the following project in Croatia last year: „The Right to live in a Community: Social Inclusion and Persons with Disabilities“ in the scope of which it realised the scientific project implementation: „Determining the Willingness of Persons with Disabilities to be Employed“. Some results of the mentioned project will be presented in this work. Samples of 573 examinees, all unemployed people with different types of disabilities, have been interviewed with an Employment Questionnaire for Persons with Disabilities. This includes persons with physical disabilities, vision impairments, hearing impairments, intellectual disabilities, chronic illnesses and multiple disabilities. Basic descriptive statistic methods have been used for the data processing, like calculating the arithmetic means and standard result deviation. Correlation calculi between specific variables, hi-square test, variance analysis, regressive and factorial analysis have also been applied. This work will present a result difference between examinees with intellectual disabilities and examinees with other kinds of disabilities on all Questionnaire variables where statistically significant differences occurred between examinee subgroups defined in that way. In this way a lot differences surfaced: difference in the length of acquired years of service and the length of unemployment of these persons considering other groups of persons with disabilities, in self-assessment of the need for special or additional help of other workers in the work assignment implementation, in the level of loss acquired professional competences and skills during unemployment, in the preferred model of employing persons with disabilities, in actions taken in a job search, in the readiness of an additional qualification with the goal of acquiring employment, in familiarity with work on computers, in the perception of difficulty when searching for a job and in the level of information about the employment stimuli. These results point to a need of existence of special compensational measures for the increasing employment of single subgroups with a criterion defined type of disability, as well as of existence of more different employment models for persons with disabilities, so that we can respond to their individual characteristics and specific needs.

employabilitiy; persons with intellectual disabilities

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