Conversation with a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor
I sat down recently with seasoned vocational rehabilitation counselor Jeff Shea to discuss how the depressed local job market was affecting Nevada's injured workers who are referred for vocational rehabilitation services. Jeff is no stranger to overcoming physical adversities himself, and an injured worker cannot complain that Jeff does not personally know how to deal with the extra challenges of a physical disability when reentering the workplace following a devastating injury. Jeff is from Philly, and that explains a lot about his no-nonsense, direct approach to advising injured workers. If you need your voc rehab counselor to sugar-coat the facts regarding today's local job market, Jeff is not the counselor for you. However, if you do need to quickly know what the best schools are in town, and what the realistic job prospects are in the Las Vegas labor market, Jeff can be a valuable ally.
Vocational rehab counselors like Jeff Shea are independent contractors who are hired by adjusters. There are voc rehab counselors who take pride in their work, who have integrity, and who are not scared off by insurers threatening to take their business elsewhere whenever an adjuster disagrees with the voc rehab counselor. I think Jeff is one of those counselors, and I am impressed when he goes the extra mile on behalf of an injured worker he believes is really trying to make their retraining program successful. However, if an injured worker fails to show up for class repeatedly and has no reasonable excuse for poor class performance, don't expect much sympathy from Jeff. While I have questioned Jeff's very tough approach to counseling in the past, I think his approach has merit in today's difficult economy.
When I expressed my concern for Hispanic clients who are unable to return to their former jobs and who are unable to participate in retraining classes taught only in English, his response was, " They should have learned English by now. This is the USA." I have a different view of the problem than that, but I also am at a loss as to how to provide retraining services to injured workers who cannot read and write English sufficiently to attend available retraining programs.
Jeff told me that those injured workers who are best at turning their life-changing injuries into successful new careers are those who quickly realize that the key to their success is a willingness to reinvent themselves. Jeff's words of wisdom, borrowed from Marine boot camp he thinks, are, "Adapt, Adjust, & Overcome". For more information on how to make the most of retraining, click on the underlined words.
My views exactly as Jeff's I am a contract voc rehab counselor. I have a claimant who is going to court who states she can not speak english has been working at the EOI since 1997. Second injury for WC now has an attorney who thinks that she can not speak english or understand (how did she understand to contact him?). However she can write in English plus pronounce words in english. NOW...... for the finale she was a NURSE in Mexico. btw COMPANY ALLOWED HER TO WORK four hours a day and attend ESL course for four hours this was in 2003.
I'm a public VRC with a specialized caseload of WC Preferred Workers (not sure if they have such programs in other states - primarily is a "worker with a warranty" program paid to a WC special fund by the insurer). As a public VRC, I'm given more lattitude to work with clients beyond the specific injury - and that often means taking into account language issues. I have on my caseload high numbers of non native English speaking injured workers. Many of them are refugees who lacked sufficiently good English to get anything other than manual labor work. Most can communicate in English, but are fearful of making mistakes and appearing foolish. I believe that with encouragement, non native English speakers will use their English more, but setting the stage for that takes some patience - and yes, there will always be those that will 'pretend' not to understand when they really do... the more you know, the more you're held accountable for, but the Jeff's of the world who don't consider how difficult it is to learn a new language in adulthood - some people's brains don't have the flexibility in language processing beyond age 13 or so - motivated workers get dismissed as unwilling to learn the language, which is usually not the case. I'd be curious to know what others' thoughts on good (sedentary/light) transitional jobs for non native English speakers.