Career development for adolescents and young adults with mental retardation

Professional School Counseling, Dec, 2004 by John Wadsworth, Amy Milson, Karen Cocco

Activities must be adapted to meet the needs of students with mental retardation because the interaction of the developmental nature of mental retardation and the developmental nature of career education can lead to a variety of impediments in career instruction for people with mental retardation (Morris & Levinson, 1995). Without the guiding influence of a normative maturation process in areas outside of the vocational arena--social, financial, educational, and emotional--it is difficult to propose a model that includes the tremendous developmental heterogeneity of individuals who are diagnosed with mental retardation (Szymanski & Hanley-Maxwell, 1996).

Szymanski and Hanley-Maxwell (1996) provided a framework for career development activities for people with mental retardation that is particularly useful for school counselors who need to integrate their own services with the services offered by other members of the student's IEP team. The authors proposed that career development is a process that results from the dynamic interaction of individual, contextual, mediating, and environmental factors. This ecological model of career development organizes career interventions into the following areas that are particularly important in the lives of young people with mental retardation: (a) individual factors (e.g., aptitudes); (b) contextual factors (e.g., labor market); (c) meaning factors (e.g., values); (d) work environment factors (e.g., adaptations); and (c) output factors (e.g., productivity expectations). The choice of intervention within this framework depends upon the characteristics of the student, the context in which the student lives or will live, values and beliefs, future opportunities, and past experiences (Szymanski & Hanley-Maxwell).

AREAS OF CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Career development is a lifelong process of getting ready to choose, choosing, and continuing to make choices (Brown, Brooks, & Associates, 1996). The NCDA (1993) noted, "Helping individuals increase self-understanding of their abilities, interests, values, and goals is a vital foundation of the career development process" (p. 2). The NCDA suggested that career development activities help students develop positive work habits (e.g., organization, following directions, completing assignments on time), set goals, make informed decisions, identify interests and abilities, and explore jobs (e.g., job shadowing, apprenticeships). The career development activities of a professional school counselor may include advocacy, team building, problem solving, and serving as a liaison between service providers and students with mental retardation and their parents (Wood-Dunn & Baker, 2002).

An assumption of career development is that future job and career choices will be more sophisticated and successful than previous choices (Pumpian et al., 1997). Currently, students with and without disabilities who lack knowledge of the world of work and who fail to develop the skills needed to be successful in occupational choices do not experience career success in that manner (Szymanski & Parker, 2003). Consistent with the career development patterns of many young adults who do not have a disability, regular job movement by young adults who have mental retardation needs to be considered positively in terms of promotion and career mobility rather than as a sign of failure (Pierce et al., 2003). Career development activities and planning can provide young adults and their support network with information to guide job movement in a manner that will lead to career resiliency and the accomplishment of career goals (Moran et al., 2001).