Lesson 2

Situational Assessments - slide 3

What jobs?
How many?
How long?

You may be asking yourself some questions at this point that are similar to the questions that I have posted on this next slide. Those questions include. What jobs should I use for situational assessments? How long should they be? How many assessments does the person need, and what should I observe during those assessments?
Well I’ll tell you that there are certainly some guidelines or some thoughts that I have on that list of questions. But I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules that relate to what jobs, how long, how many, and what to observe. We have talked about some guidelines about identifying what types of jobs we would like to use for situational assessments. And that’s really reflective of what the individuals choices and interests are that we have identified to this point in the assessment process.

Now you may be asking yourself what if the person hasn’t expressed any interests or choices, and we don’t have any place to start with this individual. I think at that point it may be helpful to identify a couple of tasks or a range of jobs that the individual potentially could have if given a job in the community. Now one way we have accomplished that is to go to a work environment where there are a number of tasks that we could target, say a local hospital, a local mall, someplace there are a variety of businesses we could work with and setup some situational assessments for the individual to participate in.

This really gets at the question, how many assessments should the person have an opportunity to experience? Certainly, the individual should have more than one opportunity to participate in a situational assessment. I tend to think at least three or four could be beneficial, particularly if the individual doesn’t have any real concept of what it would be like to participate or work in a community job. Or it may be beneficial if the individual has a very specific interest, lets say has indicated an interest in some clerical work that the individual gets to experience several different working environments that incorporate clerical work. So for instance maybe clerical work in a bank might be different from clerical work in a small office, or clerical work in a very busy office where there are a lot of people interacting with the individual.
So even if the individual is very specific about the job that he/she wants to do, it may be beneficial to look at that same job in several different sort of structured environments to determine how the person would best fit into a workplace. Now, that directly relates to how long should a situational assessment last. I firmly believe that a situational assessment is not an extended work experience. We are not trying to train the individual to perform a job. So this is not training this is an assessment, so an assessment should be brief in nature, and should reflect the amount of time the individual will work in that position given the opportunity to have a job in that community. So if the person is going to work a four-hour day then I would like to see how the person performs in a four-hour situational assessment. If its six hours, then a six hour assessment. If it’s a full eight-hour workday then I would like to have the opportunity of working with the individual within a workplace for an eight-hour workday. Now I don’t think it needs to be a week, no I don’t think it needs to be a month. In fact if you are getting into those kinds of experiences, I think those opportunities are different types of opportunities and are not situational assessments.