Partnership for Employment Support for Adults with ASD or Intellectual Disability: Co-Creation of Research Evidence and Knowledge Mobilization Tools

Background: Low levels of employment hold significant negative repercussions for individuals, their families, and for society as a whole in lost potential and the financial burden of long-term adult care (e.g., Ganz, 2007). The specialized support offered by job coaches is designed to address the barriers, and to put in place the facilitators expressed by adults with ASD (Hedley et al., 2017), who have very low levels of employment in the US (14%) (Roux et al., 2017) and across countries (Statistics Canada, 2006).

We describe the work of a community-academic partnership for employment support for adults with autism or intellectual disability. We are partnering with non-profit organization in Montreal, Action main d'oeuvre (henceforth AMO), that offers job search and retention support to individuals with ASD and their employers. Many similar organizations currently lack evidence on the efficacy of their services, which is necessary to negotiate for and retain public funding. Aside from service providers themselves, multiple stakeholder groups (e.g., potential employers, decision makers, educators) that are key to an ecosystem approach to employment (Nicholas et al., 2018) would benefit from having accessible information on the value added by and best practices in employment support.

Objectives: To further the inclusion of people with ASD in the workplace, we are pursuing in parallel

1. a) Knowledge mobilization: provide information on the value added by job coach support, and best practices in employment support in user-friendly and targeted formats for a range of stakeholder groups who are critical to creating more employment opportunities
2. b) Co-created research study with AMO clients: examining how job coach support facilitates job retention, and what the most helpful components are from employee, employer, and job coach perspectives.

Methods: a) We synthesized evidence from an extensive literature review on employment facilitators and obstacles for people with ASD, and are transforming this information into accessible visual representations or infographics (in both French and English) to facilitate knowledge uptake (Arcia et al., 2016). The infographics will be workshopped with our collaborators to ensure effectiveness for broad dissemination to community, social service, and government networks concerned with the employment of people with disabilities. b) We are examining how job coach support facilitates job retention, and what the most helpful components are in this regard, by assessing employee and their employer’s satisfaction with their job or employee (respectively), both before and after receiving AMO’s services, as well as collecting a detailed evaluation of AMOs services.

Results: a) Figure 1 shows our infographic targeted for potential employers, Figure 2 shows one targeted for decision makers. b) Our prospective multiple case study with AMO clients, their employers, and job coaches is underway. Both pre-data and 3-month post data will be collected by INSAR 2019.

Conclusions: Our partnership’s infographics will be made available for public use. They are resources to help mobilize research evidence to multiple stakeholder groups concerned by the employment of adults with ASD. Results from the case study will be used to improve AMO services and inform best practices in employment support more broadly.