Skills Development through Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR)

2. Skills and work basics
2.3 Chapter 2 – Summary of key points
• Training programmes for disabled people need to develop a range of
skills – literacy and numeracy, core skills for work, technical skills and
entrepreneurial and business management skills. All skills are important
for disabled people to succeed.
• Low literacy and numeracy skills adversely affect individuals’ capacity
to develop other skills, find decent jobs, improve their standard of living
and fully participate in society. Education is the bedrock of skills
development for disabled people, as it is for everyone else, and every
effort must be made to ensure that disabled children go to school.
• Core skills for work include communication skills, team skills, problem
solving and decision making skills, initiative and enterprise skills, planning
and organizing skills, self-management skills and learning skills.
• Technical skills are those which equip someone to undertake a particular
task. Training should be delivered and assessed based on competency
standards, a specification of performance which sets out the
skills, knowledge and attitudes required to operate effectively in
employment.
• Entrepreneurial and business management skills are those required to
succeed in a small business. They include book keeping, risk assessment,
market analysis, planning, goal setting, problem solving, how to
obtain information, among other skills.
• Because successful work performance is the key to sustainable
employment, training programmes need to consider how best to
address attitudes (sometimes referred to as the affective skills or traits)
as well as knowledge and skills.
• The context of work needs to be considered in the design and implementation
of CBR programmes. Factors include whether opportunities
are in the formal or informal economy, size of business, industry type,
production systems and the experience of business and its workers in
accommodating disabled people.
• Programmes designed to assist disabled people to find work need to go
beyond the filling of perceived skills deficits and to consider what general
abilities and personal attributes the individual offers.
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