Bridging Disability and Work: Contribution and Challenges of Life Design

With this chapter, the authors have tried first of all to give visibility to recent models and principles that are most frequently mentioned in the literature about the difficulties faced by people with disabilities in their daily lives and, specifically, in their careers. The life design approach can easily help unifying the two worlds of disability and career counseling, which have ignored each other and proceeded along parallel trajectories for too long. Not only will research on inclusion of people with disabilities and on career counseling benefit from this “contamination”, but more importantly, so too will all of those people who experience difficulties and barriers in designing their future. The most important merit universally recognized in previously reported models and studies on disabilities is having placed in the foreground the possibilities and the future of people with disabilities, together with the components of health and strengths. Consequently, the importance of life, education, and work context has been emphasized (Soresi, 2007). A significant change in the assessment modalities and, subsequently, in the intervention planning is required next (Soresi et al., 2013). Although some processes seem to unify diverse situations of impairment or disability, it is worth remembering that even for people showing the same type of injury or disability, aids and supports are markedly heterogeneous and should be found within the same range of assistances that the life design approach may offer to everyone. In doing so, special attention should be devoted to the analysis of positive constructs such as hope, adaptability, and preparedness, equally predictive of the quality of life experience of people with or without a disability (Buchanan & Lopez, 2013; Rand & Shea, 2013). Although research is still needed, these findings are promising both for the way diverse individuals with disabilities may think their future and for the benefits deriving from approaching life design counselors.