October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month! In honor of the occasion, I put together a booklist and some resources and recommendations to support disabled jobseekers below.
Recommendations
Disclosures & Determining Disability Friendliness
Generally, you'll want to use your best assessment on whether and when to disclose that you have a disability. If you search for information on how a company treats its disabled workers, you will likely find whether they're open to having and supporting employees with disabilities. Additionally, if an organization is interested in seeing disabled workers apply for open positions, there will be an accommodation contact in the job post. If there's no inclusion for accommodations, then either they're a very small organization that isn't accustomed to hiring people with disabilities or they aren't an inclusive or accommodating environment. If that's the case, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't apply, but it does mean that you might need to go in ready to educate or defend your right to be there. It can be hard to figure out how disability-friendly a workplace will be for you, but these are some of the clues. This is part of why I love the work that MassAbility does (see more details below under Resources)—they have an employer network, which means that they support employers interested in making their workplaces accessible and accommodating, making those environments welcoming to disabled workers.
Villanova University offers some short guidelines on when and why you might want to disclose your disability or not. If you want a more in-depth breakdown on if/when/how to disclose, check out FlexJobs' assessment here (with scripts for how to do it!).
Resources
Organizations
MassAbility is the biggest resource in place for disabled jobseekers in Massachusetts. They have all kinds of resources to support you, including job & career success assistance. MassAbility has additional career services listed here, as well.
MassHire is another option for job & career support. MassHire has locations across Massachusetts, so check out this directory to find the location nearest you! The Boston Public Library (BPL) and the MassHire Downtown Boston have partnered up, so you can make appointments with MassHire through the BPL's appointments page. The only major consideration for using MassHire's services is that (1) you're a Massachusetts resident, and (2) you're authorized to work in the U.S.
For more organizations that serve the Boston, check out the Disability Commission's page on Employment Resources for People with Disabilities.
Reasonable Accommodations
This handout on Workplace Accommodations for neurodivergent workers offers suggestions on how to approach an employer with reasonable accommodations to help you do your job effectively. The Job Accommodation Network also offers resources to help employees advocate for themselves when it comes to seeking workplace accommodations, especially the A to Z list of disabilities and accommodations and the Situations & Solutions Finder. When seeking accommodations, it can be necessary to have a note from your doctor that includes:
- The nature, severity, and duration of the impairment;
- The activity or activities that the impairment limits;
- The extent to which the impairment limits the ability to perform the activity or activities;
- Why the requested reasonable accommodation is needed; and
- Whether the requested accommodation will be effective.
For more specifics on what you would need for official medical notes as a job seeker or as an established employee, check out this Job Accommodations Network page, "Requests for Medical Documentation and the ADA." Also, your HR department may have an internal form that they require doctors to fill out for reasonable accommodation requests, so you might need to check on that.
Booklist
For those who are disabled, chronically ill, and neurospicy, this list is full of resources to help you survive (and thrive in) the workplace.
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