Youth Workers with Disabilities: The Views of Employers in Malaysia

One barrier for people with disabilities to obtain employment is negative perceptions of employers. As a result, many disabled people are underemployed. However, a small fraction of employers is willing to hire youth with disabilities. This paper presents the views of employers who hire youth workers with disabilities from vocational secondary schools leavers in Malaysia. Semi structured interviews that lasted for one and a half hours were conducted with three employers from service industries. Keywords or phrases were extracted, clustered, and interpreted into themes. The analyzed data were confirmed with the participants to ensure trustworthiness and reliability. The findings showed that the employers did recognize youth with disabilities as workers. The views of employers against workers were focused on the strengths and weaknesses in terms of personality and employee skills. The strengths of youth workers with disabilities in personality are hardworking, responsible, compliant, honest, and social ability. However, youth workers with disabilities have low self-confident, and are very sensitive, and easily influenced by negative elements. The employers realized that the youth workers with disabilities did master the basic work skills that fulfilled the employers’ needs. Nevertheless, they needed monitoring while working and repeated learning process if new training was given to them. The findings reported here were based on a pilot study of a larger research project. This study provided a conceptual framework of the findings. This pioneer study is expected to provide significant contribution in employment implications to youth with disabilities, and to reduce negative perceptions among employers in Malaysia.