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North Carolina Workers With Disabilities

June 7th, 2007 Posted by Amelia

If you’re a worker with a disability, you may wonder how something as abstract as the alliance of a public-sector agency and a private-sector organization can be relevant to your working life.

But as remote from your concerns as the ODEP/SHRM partnership may sound, it actually has potential for some concrete changes in your life.

North Carolina workers with disabilities should actually see more jobs coming their way as a result of the alliance. Look for more recruiting and hiring in the future. Expect more training, technical help, and education, as well as more communication about what’s available. The services already available through the North Carolina Department of Labor will still be there. But an extra portion of access and services should result.

ODEP is the Office of Disability Employment Policy. SHRM is the Society of Human Resource Managers. Together they should create a symbiotic relationship that will come down to more services for you. Because of the alliance, the federal agency will benefit from all of the valuable contact with human resources professionals. Meanwhile those professionals will reap the benefits of all of the resources of the federal government. In short, it will generally improve access to resources, promote research, create communication between public and private groups, and produce a common pool of information. The bottom line is that the underused talents of workers with disabilities will be tapped into more efficiently.

The cooperative effort formalizes a relationship that already existed between the private and public organizations, according to Roy Grizzard, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy, who noted that it is “benefiting SHRM as it serves its membership with the resources ODEP brings to the table and offering ODEP the opportunity for broader contact with human resource professionals.”

ODEP is a relatively new agency. It was created in 2001 as a breakaway from the U.S. Department of Labor, in hopes of making services for workers with disabilities more response and efficient.

SHRM was created in 1948, and now has 200,000 members of 550 chapters in more than 100 countries worldwide.