• Intro to Vocational Rehabilitation
  • How VR Helps in Employment
  • What is section 121
• Vocational Counseling
  • Tips from the Field
  • Counselors as Leaders - 7 Traits
  • 7 Critical Traits (continued)
• School to Work Transition
  • The Beginning
  • Preparing Youth for VR
  • Writing a Transition Plan
  • Transition Plan Specifics
  • Academic Instruction
  • Transition Links
• Individual Plan of Employment
  • Setting a Goal
  • Factors to Consider
  • Services on the IPE
  • Developing Job Skills
  • Work & Professionalism
• Services Under IPE
  • Soft Skills: Becoming employable
  • Job Analysis & Job Carving
    • Job Analysis Example # 1
    • Mary's Job
    • Job Analysis Example #2
    • Job Carving
  • Occupational Therapy
  • Spectrum of Services
• Difficult Clients
  • Understanding Difficult People
  • Non-working lifestyle
  • Fear & Hopelessness
  • Fear, Hopelessness & VR
  • Fear & Hopelessness (cont.)
  • Fear & Hopelessness, Part III
  • Clients Don't Want to Work
• Legal Rights
  • Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
    • Legal Rights - IDEA
    • Allan's Story
    • IDEA - Later Changes
    • IDEA links
  • Section 504
    • Accommodations & Modifications
    • Accommodations VS Modifications
• Self-Advocacy
  • Steps to Self-Advocacy
  • Tools of the Trade
• Resources
  • Spirit Lake Resources
  • Under-used Resources
  • VR Links

SERVICES FOR SOFT SKILLS

So, it is the end of the month and Mavis has not applied for three jobs a week, or three jobs a month. In fact, as her counselor, you even called over to the casino and found out there was a clerical job open. She still did not apply for it. When you ask her what happened, she responds that:

"I didn't have gas for my car on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I meant to go but they said the person was only in until noon and I did not wake up until 11 and by the time I got dressed it was past noon already. Thursday, my sister was sick and needed me to go to the IHS clinic with her. On Friday, well, my friend told me that they never talk to people about jobs on Friday because it is too close to the weekend."

One way to address this issue might be to arrange to have a purchase order at the local gas station so that Mavis could charge gas if she needed to go to a job interview. We think that would be a very short-sighted solution, since she did not get to the casino on the other four days when she did have gas. What Mavis needs is not a voucher for gas. It is a very large amount of assistance mastering soft skills. These include planning out what she will need in the morning to get to an appointment on time, being aware how early she needs to get up to make an appointment and asking the right person to get the correct information. In fact, the casino does interview people for jobs on Fridays.

The counselor may decide to work with Mavis one-on-one for counseling. As noted previously, the Spirit Lake Leadership training project offers resources to assist with training for soft skills and is available on-line for free. Other possibilities are job skills programs that focus on goal-setting, self-esteem, organizational skills. We believe it is extremely unfortunate that some TANF programs are discouraging programs like these in favor of interviews and resume writing. It has been our experience that clients like Mavis, unless they change their behavior substantially, rarely last more than a few months on a job, at most.

We'll discuss more about soft skills in the section on difficult clients. For now, let's see what other services VR can offer.