Vinil: employability assessment and job placement for persons with disabilities in Tuscany

The VINIL form, Valutazione INtegrata per l’Inclusione Lavorativa, has been developed by the Inclusive Development Unit to elaborate a specific profiles of persons with disabilities in order to foster and strengthen their inclusion on the job market. The form focuses on the assessment of the person’s employability in different contexts and projects. It is a tool based on the ICF (International Classification of Functionings) language and was co-designed and co-created through a participatory process that involved more than 100 operators including social workers, educators, professionals of the Third Sector, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists and occupational physicians of the different local socio-sanitary institutions and district areas of Tuscany.

The work for the creation of the VINIL form is part of the two consecutive editions of the Tuscany Region’s public call “Services to accompany person with disabilities to work“, which is part of the 2014-2020 POR FSE programming. This intervention aimed at financing local projects to be implemented in public-private partnerships focusing on the inclusion on the job market of people with disabilities and people that are involvedby mental health services.

The elaboration and implementation of the VINIL form was carried out in two successive phases. A first version of the form was developed between 2016 and 2018 within the framework of the first intervention promoted by the Tuscan regional government. The research group carried out a series of participatory activities such as semi-structured interviews, Focus Groups and World Cafés together with the operators of the 13 socio-sanitary regional projects to which the form was addressed. By involving a variety of professionals, Researchers were able to create a tool that could take into account the experiences and skills of those social workers that were meant to use it. The form was therefore not only an effective operational tool but also a tool that could incorporate the specific needs and the peculiar potential of those persons with disabilities participating in a work integration process.

A second version of the form was drawn up between 2020 and 2021 after the evalaution of the 2016-2018 experience. The VINIL 2021 form was edited based on the contribution of the various actors involved in the ork inclusion process of people with disabilities. The new form has been used in 11 projects promoted by the socio-sanitary authorities and district areas in Tuscany. VINIL 2021 is also an “ICF oriented” form which collects multiple information relevant to the construction of a work integration project that is also able to enhance the potential of the person involved.

VINIL 2021 form stats (in progress)

The main features of VINIL 2021

• It is a digitalised tool; The operators of the different projects use a computerised system accessible online on protected servers.
• It generates automatically an employability score on the basis of the information submitted in the form; this feature allows to have an immediate indication of the employability level of the PcD and to assess its variations over time.
• it generates “Final Report” of employability assessment specific for each person; the “Report” is an operational tool useful to disseminate information between the different actors on the job market.
• It requires multidisciplinary compilation, i.e. it involves different professionals in the assessment of the employability of a person with disabilities and is designed for a compilation – and therefore an assessment – process.
• VINIL 2021 is composed of 4 files (basic information, socio-economic context, health and resources). Each of these is made up of a variable number of sections, the “Resources” file is the core of the employability assessment.

In general terms, VINIL 2021 does not focus on limitations but aims to build an employability profile that is multidimensional and that also takes into account the strengths and potential of persons with a disability.  Its use, in fact, is not conceived as the ultimate goal of an assessment process but as the first step of  work insertion process.This porcess also allows to keep track of the evolutions and modifications of the person in his/her life, with a specific attention to the work dimension.

VINIL and the ICF classification system

The ICF is an international, standardised classification system for disability introduced by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2001. It aims at providing a universal tool to describe disability at an individual and aggregate level. The ICF is a comprehensive framework to gather information of various kinds that can be used in different fields (e.g. education, social security, etc.), for different purposes (designing and evaluating policies, building rehabilitation programmes), in different countries and cultures. This classification system is often used as a reference tool to monitor the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

In the ICF, disability is considered as “the consequence or result of a complex relationship between an individual’s health status, personal factors, and environmental factors representing the circumstances in which the individual lives” (WHO, 2001).

Through the ICF it is possible to describe the overall functioning of a person and allows information about a person’s functioning to be translated into an international, standardised language. VINIL is an “ICF-oriented” tool, i.e. it is based on the language and conceptual framework of the ICF without, however, precluding the possibility of collecting other types of information useful for constructing a work integration pathway.

New VINIL functionality for the finalisation of projects

As of June 2022, operators using the VINIL board have some new features for the finalisation of projects.

Thanks to these they can:

• Make a complete reassessment of the user’s entire employability profile. This does not involve answering all the questions on the VINIL sheet again, but editing those that have changed in the meantime and confirming the answers that have remained unchanged. At the end of the reassessment, the two cards can be compared and the changes can be observed intuitively and easily.
• Do a partial re-evaluation of the person by re-administering only the self-assessment section (section 15). Here again, it is possible to obtain a comparison between the two self-assessments, which can also be helpful for the final interview with the person and to understand whether and how the person’s perception of his/her own employability has changed.
• Fill in Annex C – Attestation of the traineeship results (according to the Tuscany Region format) directly from the VINIL application (for those who have been placed in a company). Filling in is facilitated both thanks to the retrieval of some information already entered (e.g. the person’s personal details) and thanks to some closed-ended questions which act as a “guide” and help the compiler to complete the various descriptions and assessments required more quickly.

These new functionalities make it possible to objectively and standardisedly assess changes in the level of employability following the pathway taken, can be communicated to the user and/or discussed in the team. Their use also allows the VINIL team to analyse the data in an aggregated way so as to carry out research work aimed at improving the intake systems.

To know more, you can read or download the VINIL Guidelines below (available only in Italian)

Read more on our Inclusive Development Unit