Last month, during a conference in Hartford celebrating the 50th anniversary of passing the first national legislation protecting disabled workers from discrimination in the workplace, I caught up with several leaders of Connecticut’s Bureau of Rehabilitation Services.

From what they told me by phone, people with disabilities here have come a long way since passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, but they still have a long way to go. As the father of a young man with disabilities, I can affirm that the effort is there but the training for both job coaches and employers appears somewhat lacking.

In some cases, the undertrained job coaches are making less than the disabled employee they are assisting. How does that make sense? And employers often focus more on an employee’s disabilities than on their inherent motivation to succeed, leading to conflict.

But David Doukas, director of the state bureau overseeing vocational rehabilitation programs throughout the state as part of the Department of Aging and Disability Services, pointed to recent progress in finding businesses to collaborate on jobs for people with disabilities, including autism.

“It really boils down to mindset,” he said. “The key is flexibility.”

Businesses need to be a bit more flexible in hiring people with disabilities, according to Doukas, and that requires a different way of thinking from what many of them have traditionally demonstrated. Instead of making workers fit into a certain predetermined slot, he suggested that businesses wanting to tap into this huge pool of talent consider changing up position requirements to fit the skill sets of individual job seekers.

In other words, get real. If you have a motivated person who has trouble with one aspect of the job, let someone else take over that function and find another task suitable to the worker.

To that end, the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services offers pre-application screenings that help identify areas of strengths and places of deficit for each worker with a disability. Last year, the bureau helped more than 5,000 people with disabilities to find and retain jobs in the state, a number that was significantly down from pre-pandemic figures as many people with health issues stayed away from work.

Doukas said he hopes in the coming years to grow the workforce for the wide range of people with disabilities, including physical, intellectual, behavioral and mental health issues. The one plus of having fewer clients, however, is that funding currently is not a big problem, he reported.

“We want people to have meaningful careers,” Doukas said. “We ask job seekers and employees to engage with us to create opportunities.”

October is National Disability Employment Month, and the Disability Employment Conference at the Connecticut Convention Center on Sept. 26 was a chance to provide both employers and potential employees with information about hiring workers with disabilities. Doukas pointed to ongoing services for people with disabilities seeking jobs as well as incentives for businesses that hire workers with disabilities, such as the Wage Reimbursement Program as well as federal and state tax credits.

Technology assistance has helped in many fields, Doukas acknowledged, allowing those with physical disabilities, for instance, to do jobs where they might previously have struggled. One of the state’s biggest challenges, he said, is to make sure the workforce has the type of skills employers are looking for, so an important part of the process is engaging students with disabilities about to transition from high school to find out their job goals and plan ahead.

“If they want to pursue the opportunity to be a cashier, we will build skills to become a cashier,” he said.

“We try to meet the individual where they’re at,” added Alicia Kucharczyk, associate educational consultant for the Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. “We offer customized training programs to help them compete.”

And the bureau is also working to dispel some myths and stereotypes around people with disabilities, such as that it costs a lot of money to provide assistive technology, when in fact the state can often help with the funding.

One aspect of hiring workers with disabilities is the difficulty they often encounter with getting to work. So the state also has a number of programs, including providing bus passes and doing vehicle modifications, to help them with transportation.

“Full independence is really our goal,” Kucharczyk said. “Work is a key part to our identity.”

Of course, people with disabilities often get Social Security disability support, so they have to weigh the value of work against losing their disability checks. The bureau, which has a local office in Uncasville, can help talk workers through the pros and cons of working.

“There are risks, especially when you have Social Security,” Kucharczyk said. “It can be very scary.”

Two of the growing number of companies that have jumped on the bandwagon to hire people with disabilities in Connecticut are Advanced Auto Parts and Walgreens drug stores. According to the bureau’s director Doukas, larger companies are often more successful at accommodating those with disabilities than mom and pop stores because they have more resources to devote to training.

“We want people with disabilities to be the best they can be,” said Suzette Beatham-Brown, deputy commissioner for the state Department of Aging and Disability Services. “We want them to see themselves as successful so they can lead satisfactory lives. ... They might have a disability but they still have drive.”

Lee Howard is The Day’s business editor. To reach him, email l.howard@theday.com.