People with disabilities are less likely to be employed than people without disabilities. This inequity is called the Disability Employment Conundrum (DEC). People who have a severe mental illness (SMI) are likelier to experience employment inequity. The Individual Placement Support (IPS) model functions as an evidence-based practice of supported employment that aims to decrease this disparity between disabled and abled job applicants. Part of the IPS model involves an extensive job development and application process in which a career counselor works with a disabled job applicant to gain employment. This paper examines how both digital literacy, or lack thereof, as well as access to the online job market impacts disabled job applicants throughout the job development phase of the IPS model. Increasingly, digital literacy shapes both the job market and the job application process for disabled job applicants. The initial stages of that application process overwhelmingly require digital literacy skills. In the unique relationship between disabled job applicant and career counselor, digital literacy expresses a contested power dynamic in which the career counselor can begin pipelining a disabled job applicant into an industry that is more socially and economically accepting of disabilities. A career counselor acts as a gatekeeper to accessing online job markets by determining the job applicant’s online presence. This is particularly the case when the disabled job applicant has a SMI and thereby raises questions about the relationship between autonomy and economic mobility.

Pipelining exploits the likelihood of gaining employment based on the relationship between disability and social norms that surround certain job industries. Pipelining primarily threatens the autonomy of the disabled job applicant by focusing on the parameters of the disability rather than the qualities of the applicant. A career counselor may more readily choose to pursue a career path for a disabled job applicant in an industry that has normalized the presence of disabled employees and their follow-along career counselors or “job coaches.” The online application process expedites pipelining. This streamlined efficiency of applying to jobs online effectively pipelines certain disability types into industries and positions that are more socially accepting of job applicants with disabilities and their job coaches. Instead of reshaping the job market for disabled applicants, the online job application process reifies the inequity between disabled and abled job applicants.

Additionally, the online application process allows for employers to minimize face-to-face interactions with job applicants and career counselors. This minimization doubly impacts what the DEC calls supply side factors and demand sides factors. Supply side factors include “the medical, educational, psychological, and vocational inputs that affect a person’s functioning and job skills.”[1] Demand side factors include the needs and wants of employers as well as the variables that influence the job market. Digital literacy interrelatedly effects supply and demand sides of the DEC. While a disabled job applicant’s digital literacy exists as a supply side factor, both career counselors and employers can manipulate digital literacy as a means of accessibility to job applications and employment. From a demand side perspective, employers restrict economic mobility for disabled job applicants through the online application process. Career counselors, perhaps unknowingly, are complicit in this systematic restriction of mobility as they determine the extent of disabled job applicants’ access to the online job market. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of digital literacy on economic mobility for disabled job applicants with a SMI in the IPS model of supported employment.

[1] Chan, Fong et al. 2010. “Demand-Side Factors Related to Employment of People with Disabilities: A Survey of Employers in the Midwest Region of the United States.” Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation 20(4): 412–19.