Being a community-based job coach we are often times find ourselves explaining to the community what it means to be a job coach. We respond to this question with the quick and easy response “we support adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We seek out and help them maintain employment”. This is the quintessence of being a job coach. The community often praises job coaches but you seldom hear them say “what a great job you are doing helping maintain community employment for the individual.” This is in part because the community has no idea that being a job coach is much deeper than simply relating well to your associates. It goes much deeper than that. While recently sitting down with a group of equality associates I asked them how their job coach impacts their lives. The list we came up with was enough to fill this entire newsletter but the overarching theme of what we discussed is that their job coaches have many hats to wear. Simply put, hats refer to the different roles job coaches have to assume each and every day. The first hat is that of a” leader”. As a leader the job coach must make sure the associates know how to complete their jobs correctly and meet all of the objectives they have been given by the site personnel. The next hat a job coach wears is “safety manager”. The job coach takes to heart the responsibility of keeping all of their associates safe. They place the safety and well-being above everything at the worksite. Another hat job coach wears is that of “nurse”. Equality associate Karl stated “sometimes I fall down because of my disability but any time this happens my job coach, Gwen would sit with me and help me until I feel better, even if I felt upset she would make everything all right”. Their next hat is “counselor”. The ability to problem solve is a must in this field. Being on site a job coach is readily available to assist with any issue an associate may have, be it big or small the job coaches are there to help. Now we come to the big hat which is and advocate. Job coaches are responsible for being the voice for our associates while helping them develop their own. There are countless times when a job coach has made a huge impact on an associate’s life by simply standing up and advocating for them when they needed it and could not do it for themselves. There are times when the job coach is the only voice to be heard. The last hat that the quality associates picked out was by far the sweetest and it was “friend”. The friendships made any quality are to be cherished. Our associates and their families are a huge part of the job coaches’ everyday life and we consider ourselves fortunate to be their friend.
On the surface it may appear that being the job coach is easy but this is far from true. Being a job coach comes with high expectations and a lot of responsibilities. EQuality staff receives constant continuation training on how to interact with our associates as well as open new doors for them and also how to empower them to become more self-sufficient.
I believe what makes equality job coaches so special is not just their intelligence and how well-trained they are but the ability to wear all of these hats and to touch the lives of our associates every day. Thank you to all of our incredible job coaches for all the amazing work you do every day. It is sincerely appreciated.
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