Conventional wisdom has it that the unemployment rate among blind and visually impaired people is hovering around 70%, and has been staying at this rate for at least the past 10 years. If you add other elements to the mix in addition to visual impairment, this rate can change dramatically. For example, it has been suggested that people with visual impairment who read braille have an unemployment or underemployment rate of approximately 35%. Very likely, a similar scenario could be advanced for those blind people who are savvy and well-trained computer users, too.

Today, the face of employment and the meaning of “having a job” is at best a moving target. People don’t find a job and build a career around that job in the same way that this was done 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago. Whatever loyalty a company or corporation might have exhibited toward its employees years ago is a thing of the past. The common question today from an employer looking for a new employee is apt to be “Why did you stay in your current job so long?” Career mobility is the name of the game today in almost any field.

Further, it is more and more true that individuals work as contractors or work for themselves. There are countless ways to be productively and gainfully self employed in today’s job market. I will go so far as to say that there is little reason today why a visually impaired or blind person cannot make a reasonable amount of money in or out of the traditional job market.

Traditionally, blind professionals might work in the private practice of law, tune pianos, run a vending stand, or teach. Any of these endeavors could be done as an individual or working in a group or for a company.

Today though, opportunities are about as broad as an individual’s imagination. Do you like selling things to others? Do you like marketing rather than selling? The whole arena of home-based business is booming in ways never thought possible in the past. Individuals can leverage high-tech creation of software and hardware through contracts that was only possible for medium-sized to large businesses two decades ago. Receptionist, order fulfillment and certain kinds of reservationist work can all be done from home. Those with interpreting and translating skills routinely work from home today whether blind or sighted. There is a growing number of blind people who hold down information technology jobs from their homes as well.

Let us not overlook success stories either in the network marketing arena and the newer internet marketing arena. Many are skeptical about network marketing, but I’m not one of them. There is plenty of ready money to be made by promoting superior products with companies that offer the right kind of sales incentives and overall decent compensation programs.

These and many other ideas led to the creation of the Jobs for the Blind Blog. This introductory post is meant to stimulate discussion of this post and to encourage those who join the blog to add posts of their own. Share your successes and issues here. Dream up new ideas to start or improve your employment prospects. Think outside the box and let us collectively begin to try and decrease this appalling 70% unemployment statistic within our population. I’m 100% convinced this is possible.

Feel free to post here and respond to the posts of others. To participate fully, you will have to create a logon for yourself. Just follow the links on the page to do this.

I look forward to lots of lively and productive discussion here.

Chris