Overview
Many things can get in the way of people with disability securing employment and having successful careers. These are commonly known as ‘barriers’ and can often make the impact of disability worse.
A person’s disability is unlikely to be the main or only barrier to employment. Often, multiple barriers or factors combine to prevent people from gaining or maintaining work.
Some barriers are directly related to disability or health conditions, low literacy and numeracy skills, or a lack of family or community support, while others are created by society and are more structural in nature.
Barriers to employment can be grouped into different categories.
- Non-vocational barriers are things in someone’s life that make it harder to find or keep work, such as health issues, poor mental health, homelessness, family violence, caring responsibilities, limited access to transport or financial stress.
- Vocational barriers are about a person’s skills and work history – for example, low levels of education or training, limited work experience or being out of a job for a long time.2
- Structural or systemic barriers are created by the way society is set up through its systems and rules, which makes things harder for specific groups of people, including people with disability. These include things like negative community attitudes about disability, difficulty accessing flexible workplace arrangements or inaccessible recruitment processes. Structural barriers show why the human rights approach to disability is so important. This is because it recognises that all people, regardless of disability, have the right to work and that adaptations and supports should be provided to remove barriers to employment. (see the Human rights approach to disability(Opens in a new tab/window) page for more information)
Common barriers to employment
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, some of the most common barriers faced by people with disability when looking for work are:
- disability discrimination from employers and others during recruitment and in the workplace
- low levels of awareness about rights at work
- a lack of available jobs and a lack of assistance in finding, securing and maintaining employment
- difficulty in accessing skills, training and education
- potential reduction or loss of the Disability Support Pension due to increased employment
- trouble accessing flexible work arrangements and difficulty negotiating workplace adjustments
- a lack of accessible transport, technology in the workplace and workplace design
- health issues.
Employers also face barriers when it comes to offering people with disability employment opportunities including:
- being unaware of their responsibilities or confusion about disability and workplace discrimination
- difficulty making workplaces accessible or flexible
- an assumption that employing people with disability takes a lot of time and money, especially for small businesses
- confusion about how to support a worker with disability and a lack of confidence to provide support.3
Key strategies for success
It is important to understand the barriers that a person with disability is facing when they are seeking employment, and to remember that these will be unique for each person. Some key strategies for understanding barriers to employment include:
- taking time to get to know the person and understand the barriers that they might experience, remembering that these will be different for each individual (see the Getting to know the jobseeker(Opens in a new tab/window) page for more information)
- some barriers can be addressed through supports tailored to an individual jobseeker or employer’s circumstances 4
- other barriers can only be addressed through everyone working together, taking a human rights approach to make employment pathways more inclusive. (see the Human rights approach to disability(Opens in a new tab/window) page for more information)
It is important to remember that barriers are not individual’s ‘problems’ or ‘deficits’. Everyone has a range of strengths and capabilities, but societal factors can hold people back from using these strengths to gain employment.