An Evaluation of a Supported Employment Program for Adolescents with Serious Learning Difficulties in Germany.

Supported employment programs are considered valuable resources in helping young people with severe learning difficulties to successfully master the transition from school to the world of employment. The basic approach is to providing individual assistance to persons with disabilities through specially qualified agents in whatever way necessary to enable them to achieve sustainable long-term employment in the open labor market. Even though the concept is widespread in the US and other countries, it has hardly been evaluated. The present paper describes a study in which 60 university students, who were trained as jobcoaches, individually prepared 172 German learning disabled students between 14 and 18 years during their last year of school and four to five additional months for the demands in different fields of work. Whereas usually only 5 to 10 percent of all German school leavers with learning disabilities do not enter promotional vocational courses in preparation for "real" jobs, only 37 percent of the youth in this study started such a program with 39 percent taking up an apprenticeship in the open labor market. Two training programs to foster inductive reasoning and work-related self-efficacy, which were systematically evaluated in the course of the project, proved to be effective. However, the data does not contain sufficient information on what factors exert what impact on the final success of the supported employment program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]