This month marks the 75th_anniversary of National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM)._ Every October businesses, disability advocates, families, and friends get together to highlight and recognize the amazing talents that Americans with disabilities have and contribute to our country. Especially here in Wisconsin, we as a state understand the importance of these individuals within our workforce and remain committed to removing barriers that stop them from finding, obtaining, and keeping a job.

In Wisconsin, programs to help people with disabilities are administered by the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR). They are the state agency on the front lines helping nearly 30,000 people in the state connect with and keep employment. In 2019 over 4,000 of these job seekers reached their employment goals in fields including personal care, sales, legal, and engineering. Also, because of DVR, nearly 500 people were able to transition off social security disability income into full employment last year.

As an employer, if you are currently looking for talent, you should absolutely consider hiring someone through DVR. Reaching out to DVR is free and can help to diversify your existing staff as well as retain well-trained productive employees. By contacting DVR, a special team of Business Service Consultants will connect with you to learn more about a business’s specifics needs._ Then they can help find candidates with those specific skill sets from their talent pool for a business to interview and recruit._ There are also several incentive programs to help businesses recruit talent from this pipeline. The first is the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which is a federal program that provides credits to help offset salary costs. Employers can claim up to 40% of the first $6,000 in qualified firstyear wages for a maximum credit of $2,400 per new hire. There are also other programs to help cover the costs of a paid internship or temporary work experiences to help upskill this talent resource. In addition, Wisconsin, through the Fidelity Bonding Program, will provide business insurance protection for certain claims at no cost to the company.

Businesses can also engage in NDEAM by participating in the 31 Days of NDEAM, hosted by the US Department of Labor._ This program includes ideas for businesses to promote hiring people with disabilities, provides templates to review company policies, provides sample training materials for your supervisors including how to establish an employee resource group, and gives sample social media content to share in your company newsletter or weekly email update.

If you are interested in connecting with this network of skilled talent, please reach out to a Business Service Consultant [email protected] gov_or call 1-800-442-3477._ You can also access the USDOL 31 days of NDEAM materials at_www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/initiatives/ ndeam/ideas