Challenges to Employment Opportunities for Individuals with Hearing-Impairment: Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines the difficulties of people with hearing impairment to obtain jobs as perceived by the teachers who work with such population in Punjab, Pakistan. Employment is essential to economic independence, social integration, and self-esteem, but the hearing-impaired people face a lot of obstacles in the process of education-to-work transition. Such obstacles are poor vocational training, lack of educational readiness, communication challenges, lack of technological assistance, and unsupportive work policies. The research design was a quantitative descriptive study where data were collected using a structured 40 items questionnaire to 115 teachers in Lahore, Kasur, Sialkot and Sargodha sampled through multistage random sampling. There were descriptive and inferential statistics involving t-tests and ANOVA to find out relationships between perceptions and teacher demographics. The findings indicated that there were a lot of differences in perception depending on educational qualification, teaching experience, age, experience with hearing-impaired students, but not with professional qualifications. Despite the positive attitudes towards hearing-impaired people commonly expressed by the teachers, the gaps that were found to be critical were linked to the relevance of the vocational programs, educational preparedness, and institutional assistance. The results support the necessity of an inclusive policy, the updating of training programs, and the increased access to the assistive technologies to better the employment prospects of hearing-impaired people.