I am Mike Callahan with Marc Gold & Associates and Employment for All. We will talk about the emerging concept of Customized Employment. Customized Employment is a useful strategy for assisting people with significant disabilities as well as anyone with a complex life to become employed. I am going to reference some similarities and differences on a couple of issues that are easy to be confused relating to Customized Employment. One is the similarity and difference with the Supported Employment concept that has been around the disability field for nearly twenty years. I will also talk about issues concerning similarities and differences with different approaches to job development. One approach is a labor market or a labor driven approach and the other is the individually driven customized approach. This information is based on experience that I have with the area of Supported Employment and with the Office of Disability Employment Policy instituting its Customized Employment initiatives across the United States. Marc Gold & Associates is a network of consultants that work with systems, agencies, families, and individuals with disabilities to ensure full community participation, particularly in employment. Since 1999, I have been a member of a small nonprofit called Employment for All. At the system level, we are concerned with full access to employment for anyone with a disability. We are located on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. We do our work across the U.S. and beyond. We will start with the definition of Customized Employment that the U.S. Department of Labor and the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) put forth in the Federal Register. This definition is used by twenty six Customized Employment grants around the country. Customized Employment refers to individualizing the employment relationship between employees and employers to meet the needs of both. This concept is based on an individualized determination of the strengths, needs, and interests of the person with a disability. It has a double or dual responsibility. It also is designed to meet specific needs of the employer. As we go through some of the issues, it may seem that Customized Employment and Supported Employment are very similar. It must be noted that Customized Employment stands on the shoulders of Supported Employment. Supported Employment paved the way. In order to meet the needs of the new workforce system and the Workforce Investment Act, we have needed a concept that extends the best of Supported Employment. This concept extends to all people with disabilities who would like to work and to the generic workforce system. This is an important distinction. Customized Employment goes beyond Supported Employment in a number of ways. One of the issues we found is that the current workforce system is struggling with any number of challenging individuals to employ. Disability is a good way to understand the challenge and the complexity that life often brings to work. For that reason, ODEP and the Department of Labor have chosen to focus the Customized Employment initiative on people with disabilities. It is really a laboratory for us to understand how this important new concept has relevance beyond the issue of disability. We are looking at the relevance for people who experience health issues, poverty, and homelessness. ODEP is also funding five or six projects around the country that focus on people with disabilities who are chronically homeless. I think you could easily understand that a customized approach to solving this very complex issue of helping individuals, who do not have a place to live, is fundamental to dealing with their employment needs. In this dual approach instead of having the cart and horse misplaced, we are moving together in a way that we are hoping for significant success and information regarding the relevance of customization and homelessness. An increasing number of people in this country are experiencing family responsibilities. For some, it is aging parents, and for others, it is young children. Various families have issues that actually constrain their competitiveness against others who might not have those issues. We are seeing that customization can be an ideal concept to assist people who have these complex family responsibilities to achieve employment in a non threatening way. Many people experience a lack of skills or work experience in their lives. Some have low self-esteem. Others have cultural issues that make the importance of work unclear or uncertain. Certainly, age, both youth and maturity, bring challenges to one’s work life. Minority status has been around for years as a complex issue in employment. Lack of education, habits, and life routines that are not clearly making a work contribution, can complicate the whole issues of work. To all of these complex issues or people who experience these issues, customization can be an ideal strategy to meet the unique issues that each person faces relating to employment. Customized Employment and Supported Employment share many concepts. The first word in Supported Employment is supports. According to the Federal Register, that the Customized Employment projects are working under, if an individual needs supports in order to be successful those supports must be available to that individual. In Supported Employment the statute (Rehab Act) requires that a person have a "significant disability" in order to qualify to receive such services. In its definition of Customized Employment, in the Customized Employment initiative, ODEP sees Customized Employment as available to any member of the generic workforce who experiences a life complexity such that traditional competitive employment is a barrier, regardless of whether that person has a disability of any sort. ODEP wants to assure that Customized Employment is available to a much broader array of individuals than Supported Employment has been. Creativity has been a hallmark of the best of Supported Employment. Customized Employment depends on that same creativity, innovation, and ways to extend concepts that we often feel are limiting. Supported Employment evolved with a clear expectation of success. It was a place train model instead of training in preparation first approach. That expectation of success also is embedded in the concept of Customized Employment. We do not spend a lot of time determining whether people are ready. We do spend a lot of time determining who they are for purposes of customization. Supported Employment required unprecedented flexibility in all aspects of employment support and so does Customized Employment. The way in which one's benefits interacted with employment making it complex, still exists with Customized Employment. With each issue, people could target and identify things that work best for them. Person Centered Planning is the centerpiece of good Supported Employment. In the definition, the individual is actually the driving force of Customized Employment. Supported Employment was founded on a clear community focus, as is Customized Employment. Indeed Customized Employment is not only community focused but also individually focused. Both of these approaches are valued as definitional paid employment. People should be able to volunteer in their lives but not as a substitution for paid employment. Customized Employment does extend some of the definitions of Supported Employment. In Customized Employment, a pay at the prevailing or going wage is a necessity. Some Supported Employment definitions allow for minimum wage payment. Access to needed accommodations is a shared concept that Supported Employment had well before the Americans with Disabilities Act. Customized Employment recognizes the necessity for having access to needed accommodations. Like supports, these are based individually. One does not need a work accommodation in order to be appropriate for Customized Employment. But if one needs accommodations, they must be available. Both systems embrace natural supports as an ideal strategy for assisting people for long term success on job sites. Self-employment was possible and has always been possible under Supported Employment. I think that Customized Employment significantly extends self-employment opportunity to more people. With all of these similarities, it may seem that the concepts are virtually identical. There are distinguishing factors that allow us to understand how Customized Employment takes all of the value of Supported Employment, and then goes beyond that very useful concept. One of the definitional characteristics of Customized Employment is that either the essential responsibilities of the job or non-essential expectations have to be negotiated on behalf of the applicant. This means if one of those two dimensions is not necessary or needed by the applicant in order to be successfully employed, then you are probably not doing Customized Employment. You might be doing good Supported Employment. You might be doing well matched regular employment that would be available through the One-Stop system employment services, and the support would not be customized unless one of those two aspects was actually negotiated. Customized Employment absolutely requires individualization one person at a time. Some of the group based forms of Supported Employment, such as crews or enclaves, would not be Customized Employment. In Customized Employment, the plan is more clearly drawn than in Supported Employment. The person’s customized plan is driven by the applicant’s strengths, needs, and interests, and is driven secondarily by the needs of the local labor market or the relationships of the supporting agency. Customized Employment values and utilizes an exploration discovery approach as the basis for all planning. The applicant information is only for discovery and exploration processes. It is used for answering the question, "Who is this applicant?" Only if those concepts were not sufficient, we would then use a more standardized and traditional evaluation procedure. We do not really value a process of comparing people against one another. The direction toward the labor market in Customized Employment and the contributions offered by the individual are individually determined. In Customized Employment, we are not looking at current openings or the market demand. It is not to say those issues are unimportant, but they do not act as the primary driver. The individual makes that determination. One of unique features that set Customized Employment distinct from Supported Employment is its applicability to all individuals in the workforce who have complex lives. While people with disabilities certainly benefit from this concept, literally any hard to serve individual in the current workforce system could easily benefit from this concept. In that way, it’s also Supported Employment's great gift to the generic system. Rarely has the disability system had a set of procedures or strategies, maybe other than universal design aspects of the ADA, that are so clearly useful beyond the issue of disability. Customized Employment is not a niche market concept. It is really a concept available for all people. In a unique way through the Department of Labor's concept and ODEP's focus, the services of Customized Employment are being delivered through the generic One Stop system. Most Supported Employment services are delivered through human service settings, community provider organizations, and vocational rehabilitation offices. The services of Customized Employment are most appropriately available within the generic One Stop system. I hope that these distinctions and similarities will help those of you who are struggling to understand how Customized Employment and Supported Employment fit within the current disability field. I want to make a distinction between a labor market job development approach and an individually driven Customized Employment approach. We will start with the typical scenery that exists when folks with disabilities need jobs and the local economy is characterized by an array of employers with all sorts of different needs. Almost always, there is a go between. I like to use the Jerry McGuire movie analogy. The job developer is kind of the Tom Cruise agent. Many of us find ourselves in the role of the person in the middle as the job developer. We have to figure out how to get these two diverse groups together, how to understand what each needs, and what each has to offer. The job developer is often the person to do this. In a labor market approach, the job developer typically starts the process by looking at the local labor market. We ask the following questions: What is hot and what is not in my community right now? Who is hiring? Who are the big employers? Whom do I know? Who has been satisfied with past work that I have done? What kinds of connections do friends and people that I know have with certain employers in the community? Whom do employers on our board know and recommend? Labor market focus involves a job developer making a call to a certain employer within the community and listening to the needs of the applicant pool. The labor market focus is still primarily driven at this point by determining the employer needs. The job developer finds that most employers will say, "I have these job openings. Do you have people who can meet those needs?" In order to answer that question, the job developers must know their applicant pool. Who are the people I am representing? For those of us who represent folks with disabilities, we represent a diverse group of people. There are people with all sorts of issues and complexities. In the generic system, the issues of the folks you represent go well beyond disability. Job developers have to understand who their applicants are individually and as a group in order to tell employers if they have people who can meet their needs. This is an inevitable way of looking at this. Another inevitability occurs whenever an employer says, “I do have this need. I would like to meet some of the people that you represent. Could you recommend somebody? Could you recommend a number of people?” The inevitability is "creaming," when only the best of the group gets the opportunity. Everybody from Congress, state agencies, executive directors, even job developers, certainly families and individuals themselves, have complained that this concept of "creaming" seems like some sort of a conspiracy by job developers against people with disabilities. The more I think about it, the less I think that is the case. An inevitable sorting occurs when applicants are compared against employer needs stated in a job description. The applicant pool becomes ordered in relation to those who have the clearest skills regarding the opening, and they end up on top. Those that have fewer skills related to that particular job end up in the middle. Those that just have no skills whatsoever or interest in relation to that open job, end up at the bottom. This sorting, rather then being a hostile creaming approach, actually is just simply an inevitability. I do not think it is about discrimination. I do not think it is about mal intent. It is just inevitable when any group of people with or without disabilities is compared against arbitrary employer needs. In that scenario, some interesting things happen. You will typically have an employee who is chosen from among the rest as the person most appropriate for the job. Indeed, that employee is chosen based on the best fit between that applicant's contribution and the employer's needs as stated in the job description. The other applicants are not out of play at this point. It is not as if they have to give up and just go home. We say to them, "That was a good life experience. That was an excellent effort you made in competing for that job and just hang in there. We'll find the right job fit for you." In labor market job development, good job developers often try to have an applicant in mind as they make the employer contacts. That furthers the chance that a number of the applicants in the applicant pool are going to get a job. However, there is always going to be an inevitable person or group of people that are left out of this mix. I think that is what has happened over the years in Supported Employment and in other approaches to employment that has been harder to see. We all know there are some individuals, that no matter how many times they try to compete for a job from a local employer, they are simply not chosen. It is for these folks that Customized Employment is the most effective strategy we can use. We have to move beyond the labor market strategies into a more individualized strategy. Before leaving the issue of labor market, I want to make something very clear. There might be some implication that I am criticizing the job development concept of labor market job development. In fact, that is not true at all. This is an efficient and effective way to assist people who are able to compete against others for employment. Indeed most of us who have jobs, got our jobs through a similar sort of competitive strategy. Albeit, we may not have had a representative helping us to become employed. We also have to recognize that labor market job development has its limits. If we really intend to employ people with significant issues associated with disability or other life complexities, we are going to have to adopt a strategy that allows for a different way of approaching employers - a Customized Employment job development approach. In this approach, you have the same players as in the labor market approach, but they are oriented a little differently. You still have the same community of employers. Your applicant pool now is probably shrunk a bit. Your applicants are people that if we do not customize, they are not likely to become employed. This approach starts with the applicant. It is necessary for the job developer to select an applicant. We commit to one person at a time for this approach. I will be the first to admit it is likely not as efficient. It is not going to be as fast as the labor market approach but that is the reality of complexity. We have to deal with it in its reality. Customized Employment attempts to do that. Customized Employment attempts to discover all of the reality associated with each applicant for which we are targeting and committing. It is through this discovery approach that customization gains its foundation with the individual. The individual will inevitably lead us to the employer community. Discovery approaches can vary, but they are an in-depth look into the persons’ lives so that we understand them. Who are they? What are their responsibilities, hobbies, and interests? How do they get around? What is the transportation reality? This is not some ideal we would like in our community but their absolute reality. What kind of life complexities do they confront on a daily basis? What are their challenges that they have to overcome? And very importantly, what are the discrete and unique contributions that this applicant might make to a local employer? All of these concepts form together to create a customized plan that allows the job developer to deal with a much smaller pool of potential employers within the community. The pool is smaller for a number of reasons. With the individual guiding the process, not all employment situations within a community are equally appropriate. One of the things we do in a Customized Employment plan is identify community employers that would be appropriate, given the factors that we just discussed. I think that through that constraint, you will see that job developers are actually seeing the employer community through the eyes of the applicant with his or her strengths, needs, or interests. Then using many of the same strategies as we used in the labor market approach, get the employer’s attention in order to have an opportunity to make a presentation. Instead of asking the employer what are his/her needs, we actually start with a presentation or a proposal. We are presenting the concept that Customized Employment can be effective in meeting the employer's needs. Then we are presenting the applicant actually as a proposal. In this way, the applicant's strengths, needs, and interests can mesh with the needs of the employer. In that sense, a customized job description can emerge in ways that meet the needs of both. I would like for you to reflect on this information and to give serious thought to the two distinctions that we have made today, the relationship and distinctions between Supported Employment and Customized Employment. They are so similar, but there are some important distinctions that we have to recognize. I think if you do that, you will find a great deal of benefit out of this new and exciting concept of Customized Employment. Good luck and get out and make some job calls. Thank you very much.