Measures like inclusion plans, appropriate recruitment processes, staff involvement, work adaptations, mentors’ involvement or post- inclusion monitoring processes must be put in place to fully include persons with disabilities in the workplace.
My name is Salomé Barreira, I’m from Portugal and I am Head of Talent Acquisition & Development at the department store El Corte Inglés. In recent years, I have done intensive work in the area of inclusion, mobilizing internal and external structures. Inclusion is part of the management of people in the company.
I am a regular speaker in forums for sharing good practices on inclusion, as El Corte Inglés is the only private company with the Inclusive Employee Entity Seal.
In my opinion, the IVEA project is crutial to facilitate inclusion of persons with autism into the labor market. A partnership between companies and institutions is essential to doing it consistently and with a long-term perspective. The project aims at highlighting a set of guidelines to help companies make their recruitment and selection processes more inclusive.
The fact that it is a European project makes its conclusions more robust because it collects practices from different countries, which will make the results more consistent.
Involving schools and their experience allows us to look at this problem long before the inclusion of people into the labor market. We need to adjust the educational system and empower people throughout their lifespan and not just when they integrate the labour market.
This project will allow structuring a practice that is not always easy to apply within a company. Measures like inclusion plans, appropriate recruitment processes, staff involvement, work adaptations, mentors’ involvement or post- inclusion monitoring processes must be put in place to fully include persons with disabilities in the workplace.
The better you know the person and its condition, the more success you will have in its inclusion.
The great contribution of this project (and our objective too) is to make inclusive processes as much natural as possible. Systematizing practice is what will allow this to happen.