Assessment Day first step on path to employment

On the screen hanging in the front of the room is a message written in red letters: Welcome to Assessment Day.

This May 2019 morning is the beginning of assessment day for Project SEARCH, the medical center-based job-training program for adults with developmental disabilities. There are 20 applicants this year, and they will spend the morning going from station to station, taking part in interviews and being assessed on various skills.

“This is an exciting time for both the candidates and the instructors,” says Chris Miller, Project SEARCH instructor for the Madonna School. “The journey to employment begins today.”

There are only 13 spots in the program. Slots in Project SEARCH are highly coveted. Since the program began at the medical center in 2015, it has an impressive job-placement rate of 85% for its graduates.

Part of that is the degree of personal attention in the program. The number of interns is kept low, Miller said, so that the intern-to-staff ratio never gets above four interns per staffer.

Applicants come to Assessment Day from Omaha Public Schools and the Madonna School, and some are members of the community who have heard about the program. Current Project SEARCH participants, only days away from their own graduation, are here to help. Jacob, who is interning in an office on campus, is at the typing station; Britney is helping at the catering table setup station.

In all, there are five stations the applicants can go to: the catering table set-up station, the dish room station, the men’s or women’s bathroom cleanup station, the office skills station and the vacuuming station. All also stop at an interview station and a testing station that evaluates basic literacy and math skills.

“A lot of the stations are based on the Sodexo internships in cleaning and food service,” Miller says. “But we can tell a lot through classroom work, and interviews are a good gauge for some of the types of skills that would flow into our other internships.”

Miller, for his part, wanders the room and engages with the applicants.
“I like to walk around and talk to them as they are doing all this, to get to know them,” he says.

At each station, evaluators are friendly and helpful.

“Are you sure there’s nothing left to do?” asks one assessor, as an applicant finishes laying out a place setting. “No, I’m done,” the applicant replies confidently.

At the interview table, a three-person panel speaks with another applicant about his experience and goals.

“What do you think makes you a good candidate?” one interviewer asks, demonstrating that job interviews are the same the world over.

That’s no coincidence, either. The interviews at Assessment Day are designed to mimic job interviews that program graduates will face when they go out into the community to find jobs, says interviewer Ian Froemming.

Froemming, an employment services liaison with the Munroe-Meyer Institute, is a member of the interview panel. He has been working with Project SEARCH since 2017, and Assessment Day is always fun for him, he says.

“Such a wide diversity of people come in,” Froemming says. “It’s fun to see that diversity. And the interviews — that’s a very high-pressure situation for anybody. We see this as the first step for our candidates, a chance for them to dip their toe into the competitive work environment.”