IT Skills for the Disabled
Training program to roll out nationwide
From: Information Week - February 8, 1999 - page 157
By: Bruce Caldwell

Thomas Blackburn injured his back in an auto accident four years ago. Last
year, the former package delivery person began looking for a new vocation.
Today, he's a technical employee at Alternative Resources Corp., an IT
staffing and services firm that assigned him to work under a help-desk
services contract with IBM Global Services. 

Blackburn’s change in fortune came about through an ARC pilot program to
train the disabled in IT. Those programs - in Denver; Boulder, CO; and
Seattle - produced 62 employees now handling jobs in help-desk support,
network administration, software testing, and computer operations at banks,
healthcare organizations, and high-tech companies. This week, ARC is
officially rolling out the program, called Reach, to its 54 offices
nationwide. 

The Reach program helps meet the demand for IT skills, says Meta Group
analyst Dean Davidson. The 48% unemployment rate among the nation's 30
million disabled people of working age provides a huge opportunity for Reach.
But program director Sheridan Walker plans to broaden the program to
encompass other unemployed workers. 

Through Reach, Blackburn has learned to provide support for workstations,
servers, hubs, routers, and mainframe computers through on-the-job training;
he has won two certificates of appreciation from ARC that include credits
toward Microsoft engineer training. "For a disabled person, this opportunity
means everything," Blackburn says.  

Walker says employees with disabilities are assigned to ARC clients by
matching their skills to the clients' needs. Any adaptive devices are
provided by ARC. 

http://www.alrc.com/