People living with disability represent a huge source of underutilised talent, particularly for leadership roles. A new government pilot program aims to address this gap by empowering disability employment and career progression.

The Australian Disability Network (ADN) has recently announced a new pilot program in response to significant barriers faced by people living with disability in securing employment and progressing to senior roles.

The Career Pathways Pilot 2023-2025 was developed by ADN in collaboration with the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the Department of Social Services. Over the next two years, these entities will work with four of Australia’s leading employers to help them support employees with disability and develop their leadership potential. 

The rollout of the program will be co-designed with the employers as well as their employees with lived experience, and will involve a targeted needs analysis to understand the employment barriers that need to be broken down.

Barriers to employment

With Australian employers grappling with severe skills shortages, the underrepresentation of people living with disability in employment represents an opportunity that cannot be overlooked.

Per ABS data, the labour force participation rate for working-age people with disability is just 53 per cent, compared with 84 per cent among people without disability. According to the Australian Network on Disability, this gap grows wider at the senior and board-level ranks of an organisation. 

The BCA estimates that if Australia moved into the top eight OECD countries for employing people with disability, we could see an additional $50 billion added to Australia’s GDP by 2050.

According to Graeme Innes AM, lawyer, board director and former Disability Discrimination Commissioner, the main barrier people with disability tend to face in career progression is the unfounded assumptions often made about them by recruitment decision-makers.

“Middle managers are generally relatively risk-averse. So, in terms of making the decision about who to employ, they’re not going to employ the person with a disability because it’s perceived by them as a greater risk,” he says.

“The only way we’re going to change that is to have people with disabilities employed in organisations so we have the opportunity to demonstrate that those assumptions are [wrong].  That’s why programs such as this are really important.”

“In business, we all know that what you don’t count doesn’t count. So, if we don’t set targets, then this will just become a ‘nice to have’.” – Graeme Innes AM, lawyer, board director and former Disability Discrimination Commissioner

Historically, he says, the thinking around disability employment has been overly simplistic.

“One thing that used to happen is, when we did a lot of non-digital photography, blind people were often employed in dark rooms – [the logic was], ‘Well, they won’t need to be able to see, so we’ll put them in the dark rooms.’ 

“I’ve also seen a lot of deaf people employed in noisy places because, ‘It won’t be a problem for them anyway.’ That’s very basic thinking and stereotyping. What you need to do as an employer is work out what the skill set is that you want, and then find the people who meet that skill set. And that’s exactly what we do for people without disabilities, so why is it going to be any different?”

The responsibility to instil this mindset in middle managers lies with leaders, he says.

“In anything where there’s change involved, the key driver to change is for CEOs and their direct reports to actually demonstrate that they’re serious about the change,” he says.

“A lot of it is achieved by the senior managers walking the talk by making an employment decision which relates to them, by employing a person with a disability. It’s a very clear indicator that you want that policy achieved.”

Aiding career progression for employees with disability

According to Innes, one of the key lessons employers can take from programs like this is the importance of setting clear and structured representation targets for employees with disability at various levels of an organisation. 

“In business, we all know that what you don’t count doesn’t count. So, if we don’t set targets, then this will just become a ‘nice to have’,” he says.

Here more from Graeme Innes about diversity targets in this HRM video.

Setting and achieving targets to boost disability employment and thereby allowing managers to see people with disability thriving in senior roles is the fastest and easiest way to debunk their assumptions about this cohort’s capabilities.

“[We should take] any chance we get to put people with disabilities in standard roles in the community, and not have us represented as heroes or victims – because that’s the way we are viewed at the moment. 

“The best advice I can give is, just do it – just employ a person with a disability. Next week or next month, say those small but very powerful words to a person with a disability, which are, ‘You start on Monday.’ We can talk about it for as long as we like, we can plan projects, we can work on analysis – you just need to do it.”

Need help taking steps to reduce bias and support inclusion in the workplace? AHRI’s short course will provide you with techniques to create a diverse and inclusive workplace.