Vocational Voices: Season 1, Episode 4
The role of vocational education and training in the labour market outcomes of people with disabilities
Steve Davis (00:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
It's well known that people with disabilities face disadvantages in the workplace. When they have jobs, they find it harder to keep them, and when they're out of work, they find it harder to rejoin the workforce. Also, when compared to people without disabilities, people with disabilities are less likely to access or complete vocational education or training, which is seen by many as an important avenue for enriching career choices and employment options.
But can it be assumed that participation in the VET sector offers the same or similar advantages to people with disabilities as it does to other participants? That is, can a VET qualification help a person with a disability overcome labour market disadvantage?
In this podcast, I interview Cain Polidano about the paper, The role of vocational education and training in the labor market outcomes of people with disabilities, which he's co-authored with Kostas Mavromaras, both of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. I began by asking Cain what prompted this research to be undertaken in the first place?
Cain Polidano (01:20)
Well, it's well known that there is a discrepancy in the rates of employment between people with and without disability. Those with a disability are much less likely to be involved in the labor market. And partly that's due to differences in their educational outcomes. People with disability are much less likely to have completed education. And part of that disadvantage leads on to high rates of income support. In Australia today, there's around 750,000 people on a disability support pension. So trying to move those people off disability support pension and into the labor market will not only reduce the burden on government in supporting these people, but also help to improve their standard of living by giving them improved confidence and also increased integration into the community.
Steve Davis (02:19)
Cain, how do employment rates actually compare between people with and without disabilities?
Cain Polidano (02:26)
What we see from the Household Income and Labor Dynamics Survey Australia, is that there are only around 59% of working age people with disability are in work, compared to 84% of people without a disability.
Steve Davis (02:42)
With the research that you've done, can you perhaps illuminate for us how disability actually impacts on finding employment or keeping employment? What are the dynamics at work?
Cain Polidano (02:56)
People with disability tend to be much more inclined to leave education early so they don't tend to finish school. So that puts them at a disadvantage because the employment prospects that they have longer term are lesser than those of people without a disability and much more likely to have completed at least a secondary school education. So their work are possibilities are quite different. But also once they're once they're in the labour market, people with a disability face other impediments to employment.
One is what we call discrimination. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that it's unlawful discrimination. It could just be that employers have, that there's less information. Employers have less information on the capabilities of people with disability. And if they're out of work, there is a tendency for employers to look at their disability as being a potential impediment to employment, which is quite different to someone who's out of work who doesn't have a disability. There's not that same lack of information about the individual's capacity to work.
There's also for people with disability, their disability may actually reinforce their sense of inability. So getting over these barriers is quite important. But the other thing that we know about people with disability is that they tend to spend a lot more time out of employment. Not only are they less likely to be in employment, but even when they do hold employment, the duration of time that they actually hold employment is less than people with disability, so they're less likely to maintain employment.
And part of that is because of their condition. They may have a disability that from time to time is worse or worsens, which means that they can't spend as much time in employment. So they tend to drop out. And having time out of the labor market, what we know that does is it tends to reduce your confidence, but it also can lead to the erosion of skills. So keeping people in employment is really important.
Because what we know is that once you're out, not only is it hard to get back, but keeping you in employment is harder again.
Steve Davis (05:21)
Which leads us to participation in VET courses, for example. What have you found? Does participation in a VET course actually make any difference to people with disabilities in terms of either finding or keeping employment?
Cain Polidano (05:36)
Yeah. What we find is that for both people with and without disability, if they were out of work and they do their course, what we find is both of them have an increased probability of being employment in the year after completing their course. So we find that for both these groups that doing some training, especially VET, that does help them get back into employment. But what we also find is that after 2 or 3 years, that there's also that those groups do tend to stay in employment as well. So not only does VET help them get into employment, but it also helps them to maintain employment into the future.
But what we know is that the benefits for people with disability are much greater. And what we suspect it is, although this research, again, is really just a quantitative and focus, we can't really drill down into the details as to why the benefits are greater for people with disability. What we think though, is that by doing a VET course, people with disability are able to tackle some of the barriers that are related to discrimination. So being able to hold a piece of paper up, a VET qualification, signals to employers that these people are capable. So that it signals ability, not disability.
But because those benefits accrue two and three years after completion, it suggests that not only is that piece of paper helping them get employment, it's also providing them with the skills to maintain their employment. So yeah, I guess in summary, the reason why we suspect that the benefits are greater for people with disability is because it tackles this issue of discrimination.
Steve Davis (07:22)
Cain, something important to note whenever we discuss issues that relate to disability is the broad spectrum of disability, that each type of disability brings a unique set of challenges. Did you find any significant differences between the types of disabilities that people in your study had, and the impact of VET on employment outcomes for them?
Cain Polidano (07:47)
Unfortunately, using the data set HILDA, it has a lot of richness to it in that it's a panel data set and it's representative of the whole population. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't have a lot of information about differences in the disability type.
But having said that, we couldn't really test for differences in the employment outcomes. But what we could test with differences in participation and completion rates of VET. What we saw is that by and large, having a disability didn't affect participation rates in VET, but it did affect completion rates, but that was really only dependent on what type of disability you had. So on average, disability didn't really affect participation or completion.
But if you had a mental illness, we found that there was much lower rates of completion. Again, participation rates were similar to those without disability, but the completion rates for people with a mental illness were much lower. What we did to try and test why, we split that group in two and looked at the group who had a mental illness, but reported that they had enough support and compared them to the group with a mental illness that said that they didn't get as much support as they needed. So these are people in study that are currently in study.
What we found is the group with mental illness who said that they often didn't get enough help when they needed it, they were much less likely to complete relative to those who had a mental illness, who reported that they do get enough help. So if you get enough help, the upshot of it is, if you have a mental illness and you get enough help, you're just as likely to complete as people who don’t have a disability.
So what we conclude from that is it's really important to give people with mental illness the right on campus support. So that means, I guess firstly trying to identify who, when they enrol, has a mental illness and how you can tailor the course to meet their needs or provide them with the right support.
Steve Davis (10:04)
Now that's a fairly clear message to administrators of the VET system to be alert to that. Any other messages that you feel have come from this research?
Cain Polidano (10:16)
Surely, in general terms, there are definitely longer term benefits of keeping people engaged in the workforce and what we will see in the next twenty or thirty years as the population ages. You will see an increase in the rate of disability and some of that disability onset will be of older age workers who are being asked to work to a later age. So we will see an increase in the incidence of disability as these older workers are being asked to work longer. So being able to tackle that problem and perhaps providing retraining opportunities to this cohort will provide a longer term benefits to the community.
Steve Davis (11:06)
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. To download your copy of The role of vocational education and training in the labor market outcomes of people with disabilities, go to www.ncver.edu.au