Job coach training for sustainable employment of persons with disabilities

Project for Promoting Employment Support of Persons with Disabilities (ESPD) conducted its first job coach training in Colombo from 19 to 22 September 2023, for HR managers in the private sector in order to introduce necessary skills and knowledge for supporting workers with disabilities at the workplace. The trained managers are expected to be core members for promoting employment of persons with disabilities (PWDs) in cooperation with the public sector. Professional lecturers were invited from Malaysia, a country with many successful cases of sustainable employment of PWDs.

Job Coach provides support for PWDs, employers and co-workers to create better and sustainable employment. Each session of the training comprised lectures, group assignments including role-play and summary with the active involvement of the participants.

A participant from the Colombo Chamber of Commerce (CCC), Kumaragura said their organisation has been involved in ESPD from the beginning. CCC has supported the base line survey of the project by sharing information on their member companies. This training was a good chance to learn how to sustain PWDs’ employment, he said.

From John Keells Holdings, Upulka Samarakoon said employing and empowering PWDs is one of their several priorities and this training would help them understand better the PWDs already employed in the group. She said several people representing various companies in the group are among the attendees and they plan to brainstorm on sharpening and making the PWD policy more relevant through this training and how best they could employ PWDs. She added that they would like to assign job coaches at the group companies and offer necessary support for a wide range of colleagues, and that more PWDs would be recruited in the hotels and factories of the group.

One of the lecturers at the training, Wendy, said the participants displayed much enthusiasm, were very engaged and showed great interest in learning job coach. She hoped to use the knowledge and skills they learned at the training to promote sustainable employment of persons with disabilities. 

The ESPD project has so far focused on supporting PWDs to find employment in companies under the Linkage Creation Program. Besides working on creating employment opportunities, the project also starts initiatives to improve quality of employment, in collaboration with the private sector.