Explore careers that match your (dis)abilities

It’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), and it’s a good time to highlight a feature on mySkillsmyFuture.org that allows people with certain disabilities to explore career options where they can excel.

Get started by visiting mySkills myFuture and entering a career title in the search box. You can enter the name of a job that you’ve worked in before. If you don’t have work experience, you can enter a keyword for the type of work you’d like to do such as “healthcare” or “computer software” or “manufacturing.” Then you can select a job title from the list that appears. (Don’t worry about selecting the exact right job title—this is just an entry point for mySkills myFuture to create a list of related careers that you might be interested in!)

Once you get your list of related careers, you can begin filtering them for your specific abilities or disabilities. Click on the blue button “Narrow Your Results” at the top of your screen. Then you can check off the filters you want to use. You can select to only see careers that DO NOT usually involve:

• Good vision
• Good hearing 
• Spending time sitting
• Public speaking            
• Walking, standing or climbing
• Outdoor work
• Physical strength
• An irregular work schedule

Then you’ll see a list of careers that generally exclude the abilities you checked. Note that checking an ability doesn’t mean that your new list will not include any careers that might use that ability; it means that careers that typically involve those characteristics won’t show up on your Career Matches list. Also, it’s possible that by checking some of these boxes you might exclude careers where you can in fact find a job that doesn’t involve that item—so it’s a good idea to play around with the filters and explore different careers.

From your Career Matches list you can quickly compare careers by typical wages or education required. You can also link to a full career profile (including a video), and enter your ZIP code or location to find local job listings and training opportunities.