Lesson 2

Situational Assessments - slide 7

Consider the match between the customer and the employment specialist.

There’s one more point that I would like to remember to make before we close this particular session of our lesson. And that is that doing situational assessments can also give you good information on the mix of potential employment specialist that would later assist the individual in becoming employed. In other words can more than one employment specialist participate in the assessments with the potential customer so that he or she can have some experiences and select the employment specialist that he/she desires to assist later in the employment process.

I have certainly seen situations where the customer was not given any experience with the employment specialist prior to seeking a job in the community, and the mismatch between the employment specialist and the customer was ultimately what created problems later on during job site training as well as other components of supported employment. So I think it’s also critical to think about that match between the person who is going to be providing services to the customer.
Now really I guess the final process or component to doing a situational assessment is to write up the results or the report that the funding source is going to probably want to see or for that matter a resource for you to use later on when you are actually assisting the person in identifying a job in the community. Now, we’ve posted a couple of examples for you to look at and certainly again we don’t feel like there are any hard and fast rules to apply here in this particular scenario. We all have our own style. I think what I rather like to do is to again look across the particular assessments that the individual has participated in, write up some summary notes related to each one of those areas be it the strengths and weaknesses the individual displays in each one of the job types you have looked at. Develop some guidelines for the potential support needs that the individual will need once he/she becomes employed.

So we actually at this point should have a very good idea about what the strengths and abilities the individual has. We also should know something about the support needs that the person will require once becoming employed. Now we covered some of those when we looked at the last slide, but now at this point of writing our report we really can get a overall picture of the needs and abilities of the individual, which would really with the combination of the person centered planning we have done, with the review of formal records we have done, the completion of interviews we have done at this point. So this all sort of comes together towards developing that customer profile that will assist us in making a good match between this individual and a potential job.