RNIB - Employment Assessment Toolkit

Our employment assessment tool kit for recruitment professionals can help you assess the abilities of your blind and partially sighted clients and understand their aspirations.

This toolkit is made up of two documents:

1. The assessment tool is available to download in accessible PDF (APDF), Word & Word non-breaking table. It contains a set of questions which will help you to gain a clear understanding of what the person's aspirations and abilities are in relation to employment, and what types of support and development are needed to help fulfil these.
2. The action plan document, available to download enables you to combine answers to selected questions in order to assign the person to one of five levels. The assigned level can be helpful to communicate to blind and partially sighted people the steps they need to take, which will lead to paid or voluntary work and communicate progress they have made over time.

Full details of how to use the toolkit are given within the documents.

Assessment tool

• Employment Assessment Tool - APDF
• Employment Assessment Tool - Word
• Employment Assessment Tool - Word non-breaking table

Action Plan

• Employment action plan - APDF
• Employment action plan - Word

This toolkit is copyright RNIB 2013, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Licence which can be viewed on the Creative Commons website.

You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to make commercial use of the work, providing you attribute the work in the manner specified by RNIB (but not in any way that suggests that we endorse you or your use of the work). You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work without the permission of RNIB.

Developing the Employment assessment toolkit

Between 2010 and 2013, RNIB and the University of Birmingham carried out a three-year, action-based research project to help improve the employment prospects of blind and partially sighted people. Working alongside a group of employment specialists and approximately 100 blind and partially sighted people, we designed and tested:

• a standard assessment model that has increased our understanding of the skills, aspirations and barriers to employment of blind and partially sighted people
• innovative support strategies for those furthest from the labour market, which has helped inform how we deliver services for blind and partially sighted people seeking work.

The design of the employment assessment toolkit was based on an iterative, feedback and evaluative model, to ensure that employment advisers and blind and partially sighted job seekers were at the heart of its development.