This book attempts to provide a comprehensive review of the career development and employment issues, theories, and techniques that impact rehabilitation professionals in their work with people with disabilities. It starts out by introducing the reader to the centrality of work. The psychology-of-work framework provides the reader with a foundation for understanding how and why work is central to individuals’ lives. The centrality of work also provides significant meaning and value to the work that rehabilitation professionals undertake to enhance the career development and employment of individuals with disabilities. In addition to the centrality of work, the book introduces the Illinois Work and Well-Being Model (IW2 M) as a framework to guide career and vocational development. Specifically, the IW2 M provides a structure that researchers and practitioners can use to examine the core factors that impact all phases of the career development process. The book continues to underscore the impact of poverty on the career development and employment prospects of individuals with disabilities. Although the awareness of poverty as a factor impacting career development has increased over the last 10 years, poverty is still undervalued as a career driver in the rehabilitation counseling literature. The issue of poverty will be extremely relevant in the post-COVID-19 world. Finally, the book provides a comprehensive review of the major theories related to career development and employment, including job satisfaction, work analysis, labor market research, and transferable skills analysis. Given the uncertainty of our time, the book helps the reader to either find reinforcement or develop a new-found appreciation regarding the career development and employment of people with disabilities and chronic health conditions. The book serves to be an important resource that can help facilitate their own career development and the career development of people with disabilities with whom they work.

This book provides an integrated perspective on disabilities of the various disciplines of human services for counselors, social workers, and allied health professions in training. It provides an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective on disability and psychosocial adjustment to disability in rehabilitation counseling, social work, and allied health professions. It also includes foundations of disability studies, advocacy, the disability rights movement and disability legislation, policy, and law. There is a focus on select persistent and emerging population trends in disability studies, which are supported in the literature as populations that are anticipated to represent a growing and greater proportion of individuals in need of disability and integrated services. The attention to psychosocial adaptation to disability along with the inclusion of case studies and field-based experiential exercises related to specific topics make this book an invaluable resource for students and professionals alike. The human services professions contain a wide variety of disciplines that assist individuals, families, and populations to improve their capacity to function as individuals and in society. These professionals possess specific competencies and credentials, but operate from an interdisciplinary knowledge base that requires coordination among professionals, programs, and agencies in service delivery. The disciplines typically included in responding to disability-related issues are rehabilitation counseling, counseling, mental health, social work, rehabilitation sciences, psychology, and allied and health sciences. A key feature of each chapter is application from an intersectional perspective of issues related to addressing the service needs of persons with disabilities. Based on the foundations of understanding services providers’ scope of practice, the text discusses the roles and functions of human services providers, ethics in service delivery, professional credentials, cultural competency, and family and life span perspectives of disability.