Eight participants, including several Employment Maintenance Workers (EMWs) serving job seekers with disabilities, enjoyed a recent opportunity to reinforce their skills, learn new tools and talk to their counterparts from across the province. The Collaborative Partnership Network’s Job Coaching Workshop at the Holiday Inn Express in Bedford, NS on February 13 and 14, 2013 was designed to help the participants work more effectively with clients and employers interested in hiring people with disabilities.

The workshop facilitator was Teresa d’Entremont, a social and community services professional who developed the training and delivered the first workshop in 2007.

Among the topics covered were: understanding and building rapport with clients, including when self-disclosure is appropriate and beneficial in making clients feel understood; becoming aware of both the EMW’s and the client’s learning style to facilitate communication; how to integrate a client into the workplace, including planning for the EMW to fade out once the client is self-sufficient in the position; and self-care, to prevent excessive stress and burnout on the job.

Jan Murley, the EMW for Employment Opportunities in Digby, said the workplace analysis sheet she and the others received will be useful as a research tool and will help clients who are thinking about a particular job understand its physical demands and other requirements.

d’Entremont said it was a good chance for participants to learn from each other and share best practices, and to realize that, “The issues they’re dealing with are province-wide.”

Murley found, “The dialogue with colleagues and having their feedback on how they handle situations,” particularly valuable.  Many of the questions she was going to ask were covered in the manual that participants took away from the workshop. Murley added that d’Entremont told participants about other available training courses they might find useful – career practitioner certification, dealing with autistic clients, and a suicide intervention course.

d’Entremont will be providing participants’ contact information to the whole group. “It will be another support for them that they can tap into,” said d’Entremont.