The main target of the Development Partnership is to implement innovative and effective employment system, which will improve possibilities of job seeking for the hearing-impaired persons. This will also help to change negative attitude of the employers and all society towards people with disabilities competing in the labour market.

Main objectives are the following:

• To establish Vocational Consultation and Employment Service to provide active job seeking for the hearing-impaired persons, to make direct contacts with employers, to consult and solve problems between employers and employees;
• To organize training seminars to train professional job seekers.
• To organize courses for unemployed hearing-impaired individuals and to train them to introduce themselves into the modern labour market by emphasizing their positive sides;
• To create an employers’ database and an audiovisual database of hearing-impaired persons enabling professional job seekers to indirectly introduce the applicants to the employer.
• To adopt positive international experience in the sphere of employment of disabled individuals.
• To investigate the situation of deaf employment and attitudes of the employers at the beginning of the project and upon practical implementation of the employment model.
• To disseminate positive results during project implementation and to promote the model of deaf employment in the whole country.

Target group of the project will be deaf and hard of hearing persons of Vilnius county.

To achieve the objectives the following activities are projected in the first phase:

• To clarify the functions of the partners and to develop a detailed plan of the activities of the second phase.
• To find international partners for direct participation in the Development Partnership.

In the second phase it is planned to perform pilot research of the attitudes of the employers and their forwardness to employ disabled persons, general situation of hearing-impaired persons in the labour market, and the effectiveness of the legislative system in this sphere. Trained job seekers using special databases of the unemployed and employers will actively seek for job places for hearing impaired persons. Upon testing this new employment model analysis of its efficiency is planned. The new model will be improved taking into account employment experience of international partners. Dissemination of project results will be provided throughout its implementation in seminars and in a conference with participation of international partners. In the end of the project proposals for the improvement of the system of the disabled will be provided in national level.

Planned outcomes of the project:

• To train 200 unemployed hearing-impaired persons to introduce themselves to the employer and to create audiovisual database the unemployed;
• To train 20 professional job seekers and to establish a modern Employment Service;
• 2 years of active job seeking will result in the employment of 100 hearing impaired persons;
• To analyse the employment situation of people with hearing impairment in the initial, intermediate and final stage of the project.

To provide proposals to state institutions responsible for the employment of the disabled.

Links:

European Commission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/index_lt

Ministry of social security and labour: http://www.socmin.lt/