Employers’ views on disability, employability, and labor market inclusion: a phenomenographic study

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to increase our understanding of employers’ views on the employability of people with disabilities. Despite employers’ significant role in labor market inclusion for people with disabilities, research is scarce on how employers view employability for this group.Methods: This was a qualitative empirical study with a phenomenographic approach using semi-structured interviews with 27 Swedish employers from a variety of settings and with varied experience of working with people with disabilities.Results: The characteristics of employers’ views on the employability of people with disabilities can be described as multifaceted. Different understandings of the interplay between underlying individual-, workplace-, and authority-related aspects form three qualitatively different views of employability, namely as constrained by disability, independent of disability, and conditional. These views are also characterized on a meta-level through their association with the cross-cutting themes: trust, contribution, and support.Conclusions: The study presents a framework for understanding employers’ different views of employability for people with disabilities as a complex internal relationship between conceived individual-, workplace-, and authority-related aspects. Knowledge of the variation in conceptions of employability for people with disability may facilitate for rehabilitation professionals to tailor their support for building trustful partnerships with employers, which may enhance the inclusion of people with disabilities on the labor market.Implications for rehabilitationEmployers’ views on employing people with disabilities vary with respect to individual-, workplace-, and authority-related aspects in relation to trust, contribution and support.Knowledge of the employers’ views on the employability of people with disabilities can support professionals in authorities and in vocational rehabilitation.The findings illustrate the importance of analyzing what type of support employers need as a starting point for building trustful partnerships between authority actors and employers.The findings offer a vocabulary that can be used by professionals in authorities and in vocational rehabilitation in tailoring employer-oriented support to increase labor market inclusion of people with disabilities.