AANE - Transitions for Teens: Career Skill Development

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Transitions for Teens: Career Skill Development

By Kelley Challen-Wittmer, Ed.M., C.A.G.S., Director of Teen Programs, YouthCare MGH and Jenn Harber, Ed.M., Executive Director, The Bridge Center

Adolescents and adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS) have arrived. Throughout the past two decades, the increase in diagnosing AS has led to much work in educational intervention, social skills support, research, and more. Initially, however, adult issues were not at the forefront of public attention. After all, many of those diagnosed were children, while many other people had already struggled and succeeded with their particular sets of strengths and challenges well into adulthood. Now however, without a doubt, the picture has changed: the adolescents and adults have arrived and are in great need of supports in order to access their career, educational, social, and recreational futures.

The Evolution

Over the last five years, after many years of running summer camps and other programs for children with AS, YouthCare (a Massachusetts General Hospital Program) has developed some special programs for teens. In 2008 we piloted our Transitions: Career Skill Development summer program and expanded it in 2009. The genesis of the program was unremarkable. YouthCare recognized that its campers were getting older and becoming less challenged by our social skills programming. So in the summer of 2005, YouthCare offered a modified schedule to its teen summer campers, in which campers aged 14-16 engaged in weekly off-site volunteer opportunities (mostly trail work and guiding), weekly age-appropriate trips into the community (e.g., movies, amusement parks), and weekly inclusion activities with teens from another day camp, all with the support of our therapeutic camp and experienced staff. We discovered that our teens and their families indeed needed and wanted specialized programming; moreover, we realized we should be doing much more to explicitly support their needs if we were truly to provide continuity of care as they got older.

Brainstorming with parents of teens with AS and related challenges helped us develop a truly overwhelming set of priorities for our work with teens, and during the summers of 2006-2007 the Summer Teen Program sought to address each of these priorities. The seven week program started each day in an office setting, and offered typical camp activities (swimming, ropes course, drama, field games), as well as volunteer opportunities, job site visits, age-appropriate community trips, experiences with public transportation, social skills training, life skills training, and fun for teens. If it sounds busy and complicated, that’s because it was! Teens and their families enjoyed the program and made gains. Despite these successes, however, we were concerned we’d never quite achieve the goals of teaching teens skills for the adult world if the program was perceived as a “camp.” So in the summer of 2008, we piloted a re-incarnated and re-focused program, Transitions: Career Skill Development. By virtue of its name, application process, program activities, and staffing, the explicit focus on career skills was evident.

The Program

In its first summer, Transitions: Career Skill Development served 11 teens (eight boys, three girls) with AS, Nonverbal Learning Disorder, and High Functioning Autism. In its second summer, the program served 15 teens (13 boys, two girls) with similar profiles. Teens were actively involved in the selection process for the program. They were asked to complete a questionnaire about their perceptions of their own strengths, weaknesses, career goals, and ability to utilize supports provided, as well as to interview in a group format, in which direct questioning and teamwork activities were designed to assess their fit, their social skills, their readiness for work training, and their openness to giving and receiving feedback. Teens involved in the program were motivated to engage in unpaid internships, receive significant feedback, and be part of open discussions addressing their challenges as well as their strengths. In both 2008 and 2009, the lengthy application process resulted in a group of enrolled teens with complementary profiles and compatible goals.

Teens were expected to attend every day of the seven week program, and were instructed to call in themselves if they would be absent or late (rather than having a parent call in for them). These and other expectations were made clear in the first few days of programming through discussion and the provision of a written contract to be signed by teens, their parents, and their Job Coaches (YouthCare program staff).

Throughout the seven week program, teens spent three days per week at internship sites, which were carefully selected based on site accessibility (social, structural, geographic), supervisor alignment with the program’s goals, and teen-internship match. At the internship site, one Job Coach supported two to three teens throughout their six hour workdays. Teens completed work largely independently, while Job Coaches spread their support across assigned teens. To date, internship work has included exhibit presentations and research at a medium-sized museum; photography, data entry, and program assisting at a camp; cleaning and receiving/delivery at a hospital; and software and hardware maintenance and repair at a college, a few public high schools, and a technology company. It was important to teens that projects and tasks at their internships were skill-oriented, linked to their career goals, and were absolutely not menial in any way.

On the two days per week when teens were not at their internships, the program participants came together for other activities. Career skill instruction topics included resume writing, interview skills, conversation skills, hygiene and personal presentation, reference seeking, job search techniques, conflict resolution, self-advocacy and disclosure on the job, the need for leisure interests to compliment work, and more. These topics were presented through games, discussion, role-play, video, and interactive lectures. Presenters included program staff, external expert speakers, and adolescents and adults with AS.

One morning each week, the program traveled to a local college for a tour. Colleges included two- and fouryear programs, public and private programs, large and small campuses, technical and academic programs, and campuses with and without specific programs for students with learning and/or social disabilities. The intent of the college visits included developing teens’ awareness of college options and the application process, general community skills, and heightening their focus on future planning.

Explicit group development opportunities proved to be very important in forming long-lasting connections among the teens involved, and in facilitating social skills. These opportunities included weekly participation in team-building and group processing activities designed to connect teens’ internship experiences to their feelings, goals, social experiences, and selfawareness.

The final piece of the program proved to be one of the most important, and included various social activities, such as going out to lunch each week at a restaurant chosen by one or more teens. Structured and unstructured social activities throughout the program included games (recreational and career skill related) and time designed for teens to just hang out. One strong outcome of the program has been that many teens formed connections based on like interests and like career goals.

The Take-Aways

Transitions: Career Skill Development is an ongoing and growing program of YouthCare MGH. Teen, family, and staff feedback leads to fine-tuning of the program over time. Nevertheless, a few basic take-away points were clear after two summers:

Teens with Asperger Syndrome have Asperger Syndrome. Effective supports at internships and in the community were extended versions of effective supports provided at schools for students of all ages with AS. At internship placements, Job Coaches provided clear expectations, individualized schedules, appropriate breaks, visual supports (written directions, timers, etc.), and task analyses with fading levels of support as the summer went on. Site-based supervisors were coached to provide clear directions and clear feedback as often as appropriate in the work setting. Teens responded to their daily evaluations of their own performance and the written feedback from their Job Coaches. In the community and at program-wide activities, teens succeeded best when they were specifically rewarded for social/behavioral success, were provided ‘hidden curriculum’ information and sensory tools before engaging in community events, and when they received age-appropriate social coaching. And of course, social and career skill information was best delivered explicitly.
Teens with Asperger Syndrome are teens. For all the specific patterns of strengths and weaknesses teens with AS carry, and the very carefully crafted supports they benefit from, we recognized that these teens, like others, value social experiences, need to fit in, and must feel listened to and respected. A poignant moment in the pilot summer was after a college visit gone wrong, in which the teens were acting in ways far beyond quirky or informed by social misunderstanding; instead the teens were simply being rude. The teens, as a group, owned up to their behavior after the tour, and when asked what the problem was, they were quite clear. The college visit was on a Tuesday morning, and the teens hadn’t been together as a large group since the previous Friday afternoon. They said they had wanted to hang out with their friends, but had been asked to rush into a college visit, so they ended up goofing off during the visit. As a group, they determined that the solution was time to hang out after being away from the group experience for a couple of days. Indeed, they designed a wonderful intervention for themselves—adding some unstructured hang out time before community experiences allowed them to be teens and goof off as a group before being asked to use their appropriate social/behavioral skills in a public setting. Like other teens, our teens with AS wanted social feedback provided in non-public settings, and were thoroughly embarrassed by behavior they experienced as out of their control. Helping teens maintain privacy became an important issue. Allowing teens bragging rights for significant successes added to their pride and their connections to one another, just as most teens appreciate feeling noticed and important. Finally, our teens taught us that the best thing we can do is to listen to them, just as all teens want that their opinions to be valued. When we asked for teens’ feedback about their own behavior and goal attainment, the staff, and the program generally, they provided ideas that they and we learned from. When we asked where they wanted to be in ten years, how they wanted to receive feedback, and what they found motivating, they were invested in responding to us when we connected our work with their ideas and requests.

To find out more about the Transitions: Career Skill Development program and other teen Transitions Programs at YouthCare please visit www.mghyouthcare.org. You can reach Kelley Challen-Wittmer at . Jenn Harber’s previous position was Program Director at YouthCare. You can reach her at (www.thebridgectr.org, formerly Handi-Kids).