Reducing your risk factor

I have interviewed many prospective team members during my time with my current employer. As chief tech guy I have been involved in reading CVs and selecting candidates and also attending interviews and setting interview challenges. On top of my own experiences I've been trying to put myself in the position of an employer who is carrying out interviews for a vacancy.



Most employers aren't going to know much if anything about the capabilities of people who require a screenreader in order to use a computer. In an ideal world they would have received training about issues regarding employment of blind and visually impaired people, what the latest accessible technologies enable and how employing a blind person affects them regarding the law, health and safety and so on and so on.




But realistically the people who are in a position to hire are also extremely busy people. As a manager you could quite easily go through your career and never interview someone who is blind. So employers, rather than seeing a blind person and understanding the issues straight up are more likely to see you as a big fat risk. There is just so much uncertainty attached to a prospective blindemployee when you frankly don't know much about the subject.



Don't go thinking that the HR department is going to help this boss with any questions they have. In my company the HR team is working flat out to stay on top of their duties and constantly seem to misunderstand me and my disability. When I worked for a year at a job board website I ended up getting repetitive strain injury which I have had to a greater or lesser extent over the last decade, in the end it forced me to leave the job as I couldn't use a keyboard anymore. In my leaver's interview with HR I was told by the HR manager that I was making a mountain out of a mole hill and that she had similar issues but worked through it. Any of you who have RSI or had flare ups know how ridiculous that is. So don't go expecting that prospective employers get the support they need from human resources.



Where does that leave us? For me it starts me looking at how I can reduce that uncertainty factor. I am lucky in that I am already established in my career and have a relevant university degree, so while an employer may look at me suspiciously, I at least have a background which can be checked. I am a known entity and while there is still uncertainty attached to me there is enough known to give me a fighting chance.



If you are young and haven't gotten on the career ladder yet, or if you are retraining after sight loss midway through life then right now you have a big fat neon Uncertainty sign above your head.



So what can you do to become better known, better understood and less of a risk? You need the same thing that my previous employment history and education give me. My previous employment history is my portfolio of work. Just like a web designer can take previous designs to a potential client in order for the client to judge the capabilities of the designer, you need to be able to take something to an employer.



What form this takes depends on the profession. In my line of work it means contributing to an open source software project. Open source software projects do pretty much what they say on the tin. They are open to anyone, the source code is freely open and readable to anyone and they are projects where people from all over the world get together to build something they are passionate about. If you use Firefox or Thunderbird then you have used an open source software product. There are thousands of projects and many project founders are eager to get more programmers willing to spend their time to improve the software. Because the code is public it gives a hiring software development team manager a way of reviewing your work and the way you contribute to a team.



If you want to get into medical school these days, it is no longer enough to have straight A grades. The competition is too high. At the least you need to demonstrate that you are committed to medicine by getting work experience in a hospital or medical environment before applying. You have to be able to differentiate yourself from the other applicants. This is no different to proving yourself for a job by having contributed to an open source project. It proves to an employer that you are passionate and that you have the skills.



But we're not all wanting to become programmers and doctors, so what other options are there? I briefly flirted with joining the Air Force given that family members had been serving men and were always selling me the idea. I attended the interview and it went pretty badly. The officer really wanted to see what positions of leadership I had had. It could have been something to do with Scouts, or some volunteering work or anything. Just something to prove that I could be a leader, that I naturally and innately had these qualities in me. Alas my teens were spent almost exclusively mountain biking and although I competed for my university this wasn't leadership so I failed the interview.



Get involved somehow in some volunteering work, or organize something yourself. I can't begin to imagine all the possibilities out there whether it is purely online, offline, related to charities and NGOs or events that you could arrange yourself. The important thing is to get experience, and be able to share that experience with an employer.



Just whatever you do, if you don't have real world work history in the profession of the job you are going for, don't go with a blank page of working experiences. Show them you have done something, and done it without financial reward but because you were passionate about it. Show you have gumption and that if nothing else that they would be hiring someone who is driven and committed. Doing something for free, on your own time that takes effort and resources shows an employer like nothing else that you are a special kind of person. May be I am being too idealistic but even when I was sighted and wasn't thinking about these issues, I would have been impressed by someone like this. And if I am idealistic enough to think like that then I amnot the only one.



Go out and prove yourself, anyway that you can and show up to that interview with something that you can share with the employer and that you can speak of proudly.
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