Learning to Support Customers with Disabilities & Mental Health Conditions

National Careers Service London

Prospects, who deliver the National Careers Service in London, works with a wide variety of customers and have noticed an increase in customers who have additional health issues or disabilities.

These customers require extra support in order to gain invaluable careers advice to overcome barriers to get into work or training. To support this, National Careers Service Operations Manager, Maggie Kerwin, organised training for advisers across the network on Disability & Mental Health Awareness. Training sessions are led by Beans Training, an independent company dedicated to raising awareness of disability and helping people to communicate and interact with people with disabilities in the right way.

Beans Training sessions help the advisers to challenge their misconceptions about people with disabilities and mental health issues and to communicate and interact with visually impaired and blind customers and people with mental health conditions.

Feedback from these sessions has been fantastic, with all attending advisers finding the training useful, engaging and motivating. Advisers have reported feeling more confident in their abilities to support deaf or blind customers and more knowledgeable about the different types of disabilities and barriers these customers may face.

Lead Trainer, Stacey Stockwell, BSL/English Interpreter and DeafBlind Communicator-Guide, said:

"With Disability, and the issues surrounding it, being such an important subject, and Mental Health ever on the rise it is vital that the teams have a good depth of understanding of the subject matters and, most of all, have the knowledge, tools and confidence to communicate and interact with people of all abilities and disabilities in the right way. Prospects management and their teams really get this, and their dedication to improvement on these subjects make them an absolute pleasure to train.”

National Careers Service Quality & Training Manager, Michaela Moher, said:

“I am delighted that we have been able to commission Beans Training to enhance our advisers' knowledge and confidence when working with customers with disabilities both physical and mental. The National Careers Service in London is committed to offering a service that helps all customers reach their potential and this training has been pitched beautifully to help us do just that.”

Other quotes from Advisers and Managers include:

“I have learnt how to be more inclusive and support a wider range of people in my work as an Adviser”

“This course has been fantastic and extremely knowledgeable. Stacey is brilliant and made it a very enjoyable day!”

“Two members of staff were sent to the Disability and Mental Health Awareness training and were singing its praise. They said how fantastic it was and how empowered they feel with information.”