UAE to administer vocational tests to help developmentally disabled people find jobs

From Gulf News:

DUBAI, UAE -- The Ministry of Social Affairs is designing a vocational interest test for mentally impaired people to help them choose a job in accordance with their interests.

The test, considered to be the first of its kind in the UAE, will determine the person's interests by assessing his interaction with pictures of job tasks in various professions.

Wafa Bin Sulaiman, director of the Care and Rehabilitation Disabled Department at the ministry, said, "There is a need for such a test since one of the main challenges in finding jobs for mentally impaired people lies in the difficulty of determining their interests, as they cannot express ... verbally ... what kind of jobs they like to do."

"The aim of this test is to systematise the training of this category and enable them to be an active component in the labour market, contrary to the current situation where the disabled person is placed randomly in a job which he or she does not have any interest [in], and this results in him or her leaving the job after a short period of time," Wafa said.

By October last year, the ministry had found jobs for 174 disabled people, out of which 76 were mentally impaired.

While there are 500 disabled people enrolled at the ministry's rehabilitation centres, the biggest percentage being those who are mentally impaired, there is no exact data in the country on the overall number of disabled people.

Rawhi Abdat, psychologist at the Care and Rehabilitation Disabled Department, said, "The test will contain different elements ranging from the assessment of the person's understanding of pictures to different levels of assessments which will determine the level of acceptance and interest in the job for the mentally impaired,"

Adbat added that the choice of profession will not only be based on the interest of the mentally impaired person, but also on his or her physical ability as well as and the degree of disability.

The test will be implemented at the beginning of next year for all mentally impaired children between 14 and 15 years, since this is the age when these children start vocational training. However, the test will soon be given randomly to mentally impaired children enrolled in the ministry's rehabilitation centres.