COSD 2008 Conference Summary
9th Annual National Conference Summary
The COSD 9th Annual National Conference was held at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco International Airport on October 27 – October 29, 2008. In attendance were 85 representatives from university Career Services and Disability Services offices, national employers, US Government agencies and private sector agencies, as well as a small number of college students (please see the attendee list soon to be on the COSD website at www.cosdonline.org/conferences). The sponsors included AT&T as host. Other valuable sponsors included Merck, AIG, DiversityInc, Wal-Mart Stores, Yahoo!, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Aetna, Bender Consulting, the CIA, Ernst & Young, Exxon Mobil, Highmark, Medtronic, Microsoft, Motorola, Nordstrom, Procter & Gamble, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, JobEnable.com, Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation, PepsiCo, Safeway and SunTrust. The following is a summary of the events at the Conference:
Day 1 Monday, October 27, 2008
“A Primer on COSD and Career Employment for College Students with Disabilities”, Mr. Kevin Foster of Motorola and Ms. Sarah Helm of the University of Tennessee: Kevin and Sarah presented an overview of the career employment situation of college students with disabilities to illustrate why COSD exists and the history of the organization. The University of Tennessee initiative, the Disability Careers Office, and the partnerships COSD has forged with other organizations were also discussed.
COSD Dinner, AT&T IDEAL Presentation and Entertainment: After brief Conference Kickoff Remarks by Alan Muir, Mr. Colin Petheram, Director of Constituency Relations at AT&T at provided the official welcome from AT&T and introduced the Panel. IDEAL is AT&T’s Employee Resource Group (ERG) across the company that originally grew out of each of the former “Baby Bells” and Cingular Wireless. The groups were consolidated with the recent mergers to form IDEAL for the new AT&T. Ms. Susan Mazrui, Director of Regulatory, Ms. Betsy Dixon, Regional Diversity Manager and Mr. Doug Barasco, Chair of IDEAL spoke about the Disability ERG, which is two years old and is one of ten ERGs serving a number of diversity groups.
During dessert, Alan Muir introduced Marleena Coulston, an outstanding vocalist, and Edward Sywulka, her accompanist on piano. Marleena entertained us with a collection of original songs and standards set to a cabaret style that was biographical of her life experiences. Marleena is a young woman with Albinism and low vision. She received a long-standing ovation. After Marleena completed her set and answered a few questions, she met with some of our attendees interested in purchasing her CD. We adjourned for the evening.
Day 2 Tuesday, October 28, 2008
THINK TANK – Ms. Sarah Helm introduced the Think Tank that placed all attendees into three distinct groups. Employers, due to their larger numbers than higher education representatives were divided into two groups and the third group was a combination of Disability Services and Career Services professionals with representatives of service providing agencies. The objective of this year’s Think Tank was to “identify critical requirements to support the university recruiting process within and between the following stakeholder groups: Employers, career services and disability services." Each group received the following question to discuss; “What specific requirements are needed from (University Career Services or Disability Services or Employers) to effectively support your organization’s recruiting process for college students with disabilities?” The overriding goal of this first Phase of the Think Tank was to develop customer requirements, not solutions, and to then rank those requirements on the basis of importance. Phase 2 of the Think Tank, that took place on Wednesday with the entire group, was to be where solutions were discussed based on the prioritized requirements.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER – Dr. Paul Longmore, Professor of History at San Francisco State University: After being introduced by Kathy Martinez, Executive Director of the World Institute on Disability, Dr. Longmore outlined a number of disability concepts within a historical perspective. These concepts included the distinction between the “medical model” of disability and the “minority group or sociopolitical model.” The “medical model” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily defined a person with a disability as having not only a physiological cause, but also a “social and moral disorderliness.” This caused the wholesale institutionalization of people with all kinds of physical, sensory and intellectual disabilities as well as legislation to segregate and isolate others with disabilities. This thinking, in some form or another, carried through into transportation, education and healthcare until the late 20th century. He also discussed the disability rights movement’s activities lobbying for the passage of the ADA and its creation of the minority group or sociopolitical model. This alternative to the medical model indicated that the act of discrimination and the environment in which a person with a disability is discriminated against, contributes to the disability of the individual. Paul then linked this evolution of thinking to present-day media images responsible for the current perceptions of people with disabilities. The presentation was a fascinating look at how history shapes all perceptions. A transcript of Paul’s presentation is available by contacting Alan Muir at amuir@tennessee.edu.
Luncheon: Lunch was served to our attendees and there was a brief program that included the COSD Recognition for our sponsors and the second annual Dr. Robert Greenberg Award for Innovation presented by COSD. The winner, chosen by a select group of COSD members, was Dr. Veronica Porter of Northeastern University in Boston. Ronnie has been on cutting edge of research in the area of career employment and college students with disabilities through her work as a Coordinator of the Engineering Co-Op Program at Northeastern. Her role there is as the Cooperative Education Liaison to the Disability Resource Center to ensure that necessary workplace accommodations are provided at the Co-Op site.
COSD Update – Alan Muir, Executive Director of COSD and Ms. Crystal Gilreath, Director of Operations for
COSD: Alan provided information on the latest product offered by COSD and that is the FULL ACCESS COSD Student Summit for Career Exploration. He discussed the results of the Orlando and the Nashville Summits and future plans for the concept. For more details, please go to ABOUT section of this website and look for Products and Services. Crystal provided an update of Career Gateway, indicating the significant growth in the number of students compared to last year. We are now at over 900 students and job postings are more than 60 now compared to 10 last year.
Hidden Disabilities – ADD and Asperger’s Syndrome – Ms. Mary Jean Billingsley, Ms. Victoria Ball and Mr. Seth Marbin: Mary Jean gave an overview of Asperger’s Syndrome and showed a brief video that provided examples of successful people with Asperger’s Syndrome and additional information on the various aspects of the disability. Vickie provided the latest research findings about ADD and ADHD. Seth, who is employed by Google and has ADD, gave a presentation of his experiences in learning to self-accommodate with ADD and to be successful at Google. In fact, prior to being asked to present at the COSD Conference, he had never disclosed to his employer. Just before the Conference, Seth disclosed and has since established an employee group of people with ADD within Google.
Employer Best Practices Panel – Employee Resource Groups – moderated by Tari Hartman Squire: Tari was joined by Loren Mikola of Microsoft, Jodi Julseth of Best Buy and Cynthia Grissom of Ernst & Young. Each of the employer representatives had a brief presentation including a video describing their company’s ERG and discussed the features of their programs. Loren spoke of the 40 different Diversity Advisory Councils that are mainly focused on racial and gender issues, but have a number of DACs focused on various disabilities. He particularly spoke of the MSVIP (Microsoft Visually Impaired Persons) DAC. Jodi spoke of the Include group at Best Buy that is one of 10 affinity groups. Include grew out of Jodi’s questions regarding specific accommodation requests and the conflicting answers as to how to resolve those requests. From the formation of Include came Best Buy’s commitment to accessibility in stores for deaf people with the encouragement of learning and proficiency in sign language. It was discovered that this simple initiative improved customer service and employee morale. Cynthia Grissom spoke of several initiatives that arose from activity in Ernst & Young’s ERG for Disability, including a video of several employees sharing their personal stories of disability as a means of awareness. In the various E&Y offices around the country, the firm has designated “abilities champions” to handle accessibility questions locally.
Day 3 Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Think Tank Discussion Recap: Kevin Foster of Motorola, Crystal Gilreath and Sarah Helm led the recap of the discussions of each of the Think Tank groups, which met on Tuesday. Kevin started off with his employer group and they came up with five key themes of requirements for employers’ success in recruiting college students with disabilities. Those themes were:
Career Services and Disability Services working collaboratively
Measurement – Measuring the effectiveness of the programs the two offices share and the quality of students who become candidates
Student Preparation
Critical Mass of college students with disabilities – inter-university cooperation of grouping students with disabilities in specific disciplines being sought by employers
Central Point of Contact
Crystal reported about her second group of employers. They determined four central themes, which were:
Collaboration, similar to the first employer group
Central Point of Contact and Shared Responsibility
Student Preparation
Understanding of Employers’ Needs
Sarah reported about her group of Higher Education professionals. They determined five central themes, which were:
Collaboration and Communication between the offices and partnering
Referral Process of Students with Disabilities between Disability Services and Career Services
Access to the Population of College Students with Disabilities – How is that done with confidentiality issues?
Encouraging and Teaching Networking to Students
“Signals of Commitment” by Employers – Helping universities know that companies are actively seeking college students with disabilities, including marketing and promotional materials
Sarah also briefly presented the results of a focus group and an online student survey conducted at the University of Tennessee. From Disability Services, these students mentioned several times the need to be “pushed” by the professionals to seek career planning assistance from Career Services and to take advantage of resources available about employers which are seeking to recruit college students with disabilities. From Career Services, the students expressed the need for the staff to understand what the needs are of the individual student, so that they feel comfortable coming to the office and using the available services. From employers, students request that employers really advertise their willingness and interest in recruiting college students with disabilities, in other words “Advertise and get it out there.” Currently, they report it is difficult to find those positive messages and are instead frustrated by complicated websites. They continually say that they will do the work and “do not need handholding” or special treatment. Lively discussion and questions from the audience continued.
Student Led Discussion Groups (SLDGs): The objective of the SLDGs was to provide a safe place to share questions and answers and provide an understanding to perspectives of students with disabilities, higher education professionals and employers. The theme of this segment was “Authentic Answers to Unspoken Questions.” The attendees were divided into four groups and each had two students or recent graduates, either attending higher education or living in the area to be co-facilitators with COSD facilitators. To lead the discussions in each group, there were several assumptions put forward, including:
People with disabilities cannot work the typical 40 hour work week.
All students with disabilities will need an accommodation and that accommodation will be expensive.
If a student with a disability asks for an accommodation, their chance of success in the workplace will be compromised.
All accommodations are provided by the employers.
Employers feel that students with disabilities know what accommodations they will need.
There is not a clear process in deciding whether to disclose a disability or not.
Questions, pertaining to these assumptions were asked of each of the students and audience members.
At the conclusion, we met as the larger group and recapped the discussions.
Crystal Gilreath moderated along with Jodi Julseth, Jody Hestand of Wal-Mart Stores, Mary Jean Billingsley and Tari Hartman Squire, all of whom acted as facilitators with the students.
Student Perpective
The topics discussed in the groups included the following:
Safety in terms of evacuation / personal safety and safety in confidentiality and proper disclosure of a disability.
Employers’ strong and easily seen commitment to diversity to include disability, at the corporate level, but also at the local hiring manager level
“Deconstruction of biases” at the hiring manager level and the overall corporate culture, recognizing those biases and focusing training where it needs to be
Employer needs to be straightforward in questioning about whether an individual can or cannot do a particular task related to the job, such as how the person works with e-mail
Employer Perspective
How employers are to pay for reasonable accommodations – centralized budget or departments
How does the employers’ process of implementing accommodations work?
Fear internally from employees in how to interact with a person with a disability
Fear externally from customers uncomfortable being served a person with a disability
Motorola’s “behavior anchors”, peer to peer performance reviews in diversity
Value added by hiring people with disabilities
Diversity being the primary reason for a company’s commitment to hiring people with disabilities
Security clearances for interpreters and other individuals possibly necessary to assist a person with a disability
Going beyond the GPA in identifying interview candidates
Urgency for students to start the career preparation process EARLY
KEYNOTE SPEAKER – Ms. Judith Heumann, Director Department of Disability Services, City of Washington DC: Judy discussed her life experience as a woman with polio, including the fight for education and for work in chosen field. Her message to our attendees was that most of us at the COSD Conference are atypical, in that we understand the issues facing college students with disabilities. Judy, as an employer for her entire working life is very encouraged with the work we discussed at the Conference and going forward.
After thanking Judy, Alan Muir adjourned the Conference.
Thanks to the great work of our planning committee, the Conference was a huge success with Evaluations reflecting 97% of 38 respondents rating the Conference in the Very Good to Excellent range.