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What is self-advocacy and why does it matter for people with disabilities?
The journey to and through employment is rooted in self-advocacy: the ability to ask effectively for what you need, understand your rights and responsibilities, and help your employer make work a better place to be. Built on my lived experience of disability, my approach focuses on self-regulation and self-advocacy through four interrelated components in mind: self-awareness, self-exploration, self-management and self-advocacy.
Here we explore how self-advocacy can be better approached by students and career advisors – as a mindset that is inclusive of all abilities – both innate and derived from their lived experience of disability. In this view we also explore how career advisors can best support students in developing a self-advocacy mindset that sets the student up for success in interactions with prospective employers.
Tip #1: Help students learn their strengths and challenges down to the last detail
Self-awareness is built on the consideration that positive attributes and challenges/disabilities are equally important in defining career paths.
- Self-awareness for students: Strengths are what one knows they can do, learn or master, with ease and enjoyment. Challenges are those aspects of students’ disability that take more attention, effort and time. Challenges are opportunities for growth and are often fertile ground for innovation and problem solving. Considering one’s challenges as well as strengths is essential to help students focus on the specifics that will maximize their career potential. If not, students may push themselves to deny their disabilities and compete in ways that may disadvantage them.
- Self-awareness for career advisors: Your role is to assist students in articulating strengths and challenges in a balanced, forward-focused way so that everything lands as an asset rather than a liability. Recognize and emphasize the employability skills that students with disabilities develop through navigating and managing the challenges of their health conditions. Adaptability, resilience, teamwork, communication and problem solving are not only valued by employers, but also closely related to career success in a rapidly changing work environment.
Tip #2: Support students in exploration and discovery of environments where they can thrive
Self-exploration involves facing disability constraints head on. Doing so will help students make proactive decisions that will help them feel fully enabled and supported at work.
- Self-exploration for students: Turn the student’s attention to their environment – look at what works and does not work for them – down to the smallest detail. How does their disability frame their choices and direct their path? The more a student observes constraints, the richer their choices become – the advantage lies in learning more quickly from misdirection and spending less time in environments that do not work so well for them – in favour of environments that do.
- Self-exploration for career advisors: Your role is to observe and take note of what students may or may not be aware of – or may feel unable to articulate due to fear about how they are perceived and treated because of their disabilities. Understand that these fears are real and justified. It is critical for students with disabilities to face their constraints head on. Your role includes helping students to articulate their constraints and produce practical solutions that they can easily apply at work.
Tip #3: Help students become experts on their disability and the accommodations they need
Self-regulation, as a subset of self-management, is all about choosing how to present just the facts about oneself, without emotional attachment, in an empowering way when necessary.
- Self-regulation for students: Once they understand their strengths and challenges and best workplace environments, it is time to delve into understanding how to speak with authority about their needs for accommodation. In this context, self-management means one is taking responsibility and recognizing the right to set boundaries regarding how much they disclose about their disability. Self-regulation involves examining emotions, fears and expectations around how one presents themself to others. Students begin to shift their attention to what they can control, to project self-confidence and how to direct the conversation toward their abilities.
- Self-management with a focus on self-regulation for career advisors: Assist students in developing scripts to request accommodations. Consider rehearsal and role-play in a mock interview format. Give specific feedback on language, style and effective presentation so that students can speak fluently about their skills and accommodation needs without shame. This will enable their success and that of their prospective employer.
Tip #4: Support students in presenting their disability as a signifier for competitive advantage for employers
Self-advocacy develops from real access and needs that jobseekers with disabilities face every day. It is built on the understanding that disability helps develop highly sought after employability skills that employers value.
- Self-advocacy for students: Self-advocacy is a step beyond asking for accommodations. It is the ability to stand up as necessary, to be included, to help create the conditions for one’s full participation at work and to assert their value proposition, inclusive of their disability, as an employee.
- Self-advocacy for career advisors: Your role is to guide the student in articulating their value proposition. Offer affirming feedback and help the student reframe their disability as a golden asset, to be leveraged at all stages of the employment process.
By the time the student reaches this stage of employment preparation, they are encouraged to look at disability as the productivity and morale boosting edge that employers are starting to realize they most need and want. This is the mindset behind successful self-advocacy.
An earlier unpublished version of this paper authored by Marina Pinto Miller, Ph.D., formed the basis for Humber Polytechnic’s Self-Advocacy Learning (SAL) initiative, developed in collaboration with Student Success Advisor Elaine Belanger-Porter, M.A. ED. Marina’s lived experience of disability anchors self-advocacy in real‑world realities.
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