Lauren Bryant is a University of Illinois student who volunteered as an AbilityLinks blogger this summer. I was pleased to supervise Lauren and serve as her editor. Here is Lauren's final blog post of the summer. - Bill O'Connor

In the interest of being completely honest with the readers of this blog, I’m going to make a confession: I have trouble focusing on work more often than not. I am a chronic multitasker: usually those other tasks are not work related.

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            Hello AbilityLinks blog readers! I haven’t posted on this blog in quite some time, and I hope this blog post will explain, at least in part, why I’ve been away for so long. As you may remember from my last blog post, I was attending the Illinois Center for Rehabilitation and Education (ICRE) down in the city. This program helped to teach physically disabled young adults independent living skills. ICRE only lasts for two years though, so the question then became, what would I do now? There were several possibilities, including...

Preparation for a virtual job fair is very similar to how one would prepare to attend a fair in person with one exception, it will be online and your computer connections must be up to speed. The employers will still have  "booths" set up with information about their company and jobs.  The advantage of attending a virtual job fair is that you can talk to and get your resume in front of many recruiters and hiring managers in the comfort of your own home.

Although most people will attend a job fair with the intentions of finding a job, my suggestion is to attend the virtual job fair...

            The interview process can be a nerve-wracking experience for any job-seeker, but people with disabilities can have extra concerns to deal with. Mark Williams, Consulting Director of the Chicagoland Business Leadership Network, presented a webinar in conjunction with AbilityLinks on February 26, 2015, tackling these very issues. The webinar, called “Get the Job: Manage the Impression You and Your Disability Make During the Job Interview,” had 241 registrants, including both job-seekers and employers....

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report from August, 2014, 80.2% of persons with disabilities are not participating in the labor force. The non participation rate for persons without disabilities is only 31.8% according to the same report.  The latest-recorded unemployment rate for disabled job seekers (from August 2014) stands at 12.8.%, versus 6% for the non-disabled community. These are discouraging numbers, but my point in this writing is not to embolden the badness of the labor landscape for those people in the disability community who are trying to engineer their employment...