Be inclusive! Wie Inklusion von Menschen mit Behinderung in KMUs funktioniert – Lernmaterial für Jobsuche und Beschäftigung

Be Inclusive! refers to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) of 2006. This convention unequivocally calls for the participation of persons with disabilities in all areas of life, including education and work. In the field of work and employment in particular, it is mostly privately run businesses and companies that consider employing persons with disabilities an option. This is where this project comes in: it offers human resources managers in small and medium-sized enterprises various learning tools that prepare them for employing people with disabilities. By acquiring skills, motivation and an appropriate attitude, the aim is to lay the foundations for greater participation in line with the UN CRPD. The individual project partners, and in particular the Klausenhof Academy as coordinator, have been involved in supporting people with disabilities for many years. This applies in particular to job placement. On the one hand, they encounter social commitment – on the other hand, they encounter many reservations and ignorance. Often, there is a lack of knowledge and entrepreneurial courage to hire people with disabilities and give them prospects within the company.

Achieving inclusion as defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) requires a significant change in established non-inclusive educational practices. The project involved sharing experiences, collecting examples and developing products to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in implementing inclusion. In doing so, the requirements of the institutions must be taken into account as well as the needs of people with disabilities. The central goal of the project is to improve the inclusive competence and sensitivity of human resources managers and management. The project plan envisaged involving people with disabilities in the development process and demonstrating successful inclusion from their perspective. Specifically, the products are intended to motivate and guide companies to consider this target group when filling new positions. Specifically, the products are to be understood as microlearning offerings that can be used in the placement process. When partners are looking for a job for a person with disabilities as part of a labour market project, they can make targeted use of the project results.

Three of the four work packages were dedicated to the production of outputs. The partners formed an effective working community with distributed roles and tasks. The partners first created an analysis guide, which each organisation used to record and describe the situation in their own country (work package 2). This allowed everyone to first take a close look at the specific situation in their own countries and critically examine it. The results were then compiled, compared and translated in a comprehensive document. The findings from this process formed the basis for the production of the educational videos (work package 3). Here, too, a detailed concept was developed jointly. According to this concept, each partner worked on a different thematic focus using a concrete example with different forms of disability. The production was carried out jointly with people with disabilities and a local company. In addition, learning materials were created – the partners responsible for this were those with experience in this field as educational and specialist institutions.

In accordance with the project plan, the partners have developed three products: 1. Brochure ‘People with disabilities in the labour market: placement, inclusion and sustainable employment in SMEs’ 2. Eight educational videos with a duration of approx. 5-7 minutes and a trailer. 3. Additional learning material in three parts (checklist, fact sheets and presentations) for practical use in the workplace In addition to network building, the improvement of the partners' own inclusive competence is also worth mentioning. The exchange between the project partners in particular was considered by all to be very positive and beneficial. This is all the more relevant because large and important organisations such as EASPD and the Klausenhof Academy were actively involved. It is also important to mention the awareness-raising at local and regional level, which was promoted by the considerable dissemination activities. Working towards better participation is an important social task. This project has contributed to this.