In recognition of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, I am pleased to offer up FamilyConnect’s second “Ask the Experts” blog post, which focuses on career education. My name is Dr. Karen Wolffe, and I am the director of APH CareerConnect®, a free online resource that connects young people to visually impaired mentors, and provides families with videos of blind people on the job, success stories, and more.
Career education is critical for preparing children from their infancy to transition from school and childhood dependency to work and adult life. I have joined some of my professional colleagues and recorded responses to a series of relevant questions and those audio interviews are available on FamilyConnect in the Education section. Specifically, I answered the following questions:
- What three things should parents know about career education?
- What can families do at home to support career education skills?
- What can professionals do to help parents reinforce career education skills?
- And, what are the benefits of a parent/professional collaboration on building career education skills?
I hope you will take a few minutes to listen to my audio interviews or read the transcripts of those interviews. I welcome any questions or comments you might have. The intent of this feature, the “Ask the Experts” blog, is to open up a dialogue between families and experts in fields of interest (if you read last month’s blog post you know that parents are included as experts as well as professionals). These blogs are being archived on FamilyConnect so that you may access them for the foreseeable future.
Please let me know if you have any questions about how to encourage your visually impaired child to consider career opportunities…we’ll all benefit from an open dialogue, but of course it’s always the children who stand to gain the most from our working together on issues of importance. I will happily respond to any comments posted. Thank you for your participation.