Hope School in Johannesburg hosted the fifth annual Hope-Mandeville Disability Careers expo on Wednesday and Thursday.
While the expo has traditionally been aimed at high school learners, this year it opened its doors more widely to recent matriculants and tertiary graduates with disabilities who are seeking employment.
The expo - a joint venture between Hope School and Mandeville Disability Swimming - aims to serve as a communication channel between people with disabilities who are looking for career opportunities, and universities, agencies, and companies that provide these opportunities.
The expo featured over 30 exhibitors, including universities, training and recruiting institutions, government departments and services, and corporations.
The universities - namely Wits University, the University of Johannesburg, the University of Pretoria, and the Tshwane Institute of Technology - were involved in "breakaway" sessions with attendees to teach them skills such as applying for universities and bursaries, said Paddy Slattery, a member of the expo's committee.
Government departments and services that exhibited included the South African Police Service and the SABC.
ICT opportunities
While the expo makes particular effort to connect job-seekers with opportunities in ICT fields - as ICTs can help people with disabilities to tailor their work process to their individual needs - no ICT companies exhibited this year, said Slattery.
However, the Media, Information and Communication Technologies Sector Education and Training Authority (Mict Seta) was present, and can hopefully connect job-seekers with ICT companies through the ICT education and training programmes they offer, Slattery noted.
In addition, many large companies have vacancies in their IT departments, or offer a wide range of computer-based jobs, for example in the banking and insurance sectors, said Slattery.
Hollard was one such company present at the expo. The insurance company offers learnerships and internships in insurance, which often form a pathway to permanent employment, said Lolly Gwabavu, learning manager for group services at Hollard Academy SA.
The company employs a high percentage of people with a range of disabilities, establishing their individual accessibility needs on a case-by-case basis, Gwabavu elaborated.
"Part of the reason we participate in the expo is to highlight that being disabled doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities [available]," said Gwabavu.
The event also features a number of motivational speakers with disabilities, some of whom are Hope School alumni, said Slattery, noting that one of the First National Bank representatives at the expo on Thursday was a Hope School alumnus.
Yet Slattery notes that keeping track of past expo attendees' and Hope School learners' progress through the working world is difficult, as the school is in need of a secure database that could fit this function.
Changing perceptions
When asked whether he thought people with disabilities can find work more easily than they could ten or 20 years ago, Slattery responded "in general, probably not".
The main challenges people with disabilities continue to face in finding employment are potential employers' misconceptions about their ability to work, and companies' unwillingness to make extra effort to accommodate the specific needs of people with disabilities, said Slattery, adding that government could play a stronger role in helping to address these problems.
"We'd like to see something like this [expo] happening in every province, but it's not, and we'd like to see the government taking ownership of it and making it a lot bigger... but it's not happening at the moment," Slattery said.
While some organisations are making an effort to recruit people with disabilities and make their workplaces more accessible to them, on a societal level this kind of social change is "happening, but too slow," he concluded.
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