The FIU Embrace Center for Advancing Inclusive Communities and the Healthy Work Lab seek to develop and refine, over the course of this three-year project, a training intervention for managers aimed at developing critical supervisory skills and knowledge areas related to creating psychologically healthy workplaces for persons with developmental disabilities, building inclusive teams, maximizing job fit through supports and accommodations, training employees on the job, managing employee performance and promoting career growth. The training intervention offers ‘hands-on’ strategies for everyday management practice. The goal of this project is to engage in inclusive research practices to further develop an accessible employer-ready training intervention aimed at building managerial capacity to promote the conditions for persons with IDD to produce, grow and feel valued in the workplace. The objectives of this research are to: 1) include representation of persons with IDD and increase their contributions in the development of employer training content, 2) ensure the accessibility of all training content, including both online and written materials, and 3) develop a rigorous intervention evaluation protocol that can be used to gather evidence-based support for the training. Anticipated outcomes include recommendations for training content modifications by persons with disabilities, accessibility test findings and required solutions, and an enhanced evaluation protocol and preliminary training intervention evaluation data. The expected products are:1) training content modifications, training case studies, and activities resulting from the input of persons with IDD, 2) an enhanced training evaluation protocol and preliminary evaluation data to guide training content modifications, and 3) accessibility testing results and implementation of improvements to content and technologies used in the training intervention.
