About this Series
The Administration on Disabilities (AoD) grantees play varied roles in career development and advancement for people with disabilities. Some grantees provide direct job or career coaching, while others fund, convene, and coordinate with service providers and other stakeholders to advance competitive, integrated employment. This episode is part one of the series titled, From Readiness to Results: Career Development Considerations for Job Seekers, Coaches, and Employers. This series will explore a multi-pronged approach to career development and is intended for all AoD grantees, as well as individual job seekers, family members, and employers.
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About this Episode
In this episode, DETAC Strategic Advisor Dan Middleton shares practical strategies for supporting people with disabilities in their career journeys and how individuals can play an active role in their own career advancement. Drawing on his experience, Dan highlights how tools such as apps, checklists, and planning supports can be introduced in practice and used on the job. The conversation also explores how people and professionals who provide supports can build shared understanding of these tools among job seekers and employers to drive success.
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Presenters
Donald Taylor has been with TASH since 2014, where he is the Manager of Membership & Communications, responsible for membership and chapters, data systems and communication, and collaborates closely with other staff to make sure TASH systems support their work. Donald comes from a background of data systems, operations and business analysis, going back to the 1990s. Donald came to the world of disability while pursuing a degree in history. The history profession is deeply interested in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and fellow students studying biomedical systems of oppression inspired in him the desire to make a contribution to this aspect of social justice.
Resources discussed in this podcast
Transcript
Announcer: You are listening to the Disability Employment Technical Assistance Center, or DETAC Podcast. In this podcast, we share conversations with leaders, practitioners, and advocates who are working to improve competitive integrated employment and economic outcomes for people with disabilities.
This is part one of a series titled “From Readiness to Results: Career Development Considerations for Job Seekers, Coaches, and Employers”. In this episode, we’re talking with DETAC Strategic Advisor, Dan Middleton, from the Catalight Research Foundation, about supporting job seekers and employers with disabilities in their career journeys, and how individuals can play an active role in their own career advancement.
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Donald Taylor: Welcome, Dan. Thank you for joining us today on the DETAC Podcast. To get started, would you please introduce yourself for listeners?
Dan Middleton: Thank you, Donald. Hi, my name is Dan Middleton. I’m a senior Director for Clinical Excellence Planning and Development for the Catalight Foundation. In this, role I create partnerships with state and federal government agencies, along with the Easterseals National Office. My company owns two other Easterseals national organizations in Hawaii and Northern California. Prior to Catalight, I worked at a number of Fortune 500 companies in senior management positions. I also have over 20 years of experience as a career and executive coach, helping hundreds of clients navigate company cultures and find employment. In my spare time, I provide career coaching and job coaching to adults on the spectrum for an autism organization in San Francisco called AASCEND.
Donald Taylor: Dan, tell us about Catalight. What services do they offer in the world of disability employment, and what is your role there?
Dan Middleton: So, Catalight is a behavioral health service provider. We own two Easterseals companies, Easterseals, Hawaii, and Easterseals, Northern California. We provide services to over 25,000 families across those two service providers. We’ve been doing this for a number of years. Some of these Easterseals are 75, 80 years old. My job at Catalight is to bring out the employment services. So, if you think about the behavioral health services, we normally provide them from the ages of 3 to 18. We’re doing a little bit more work in the day programs for adults. But the employment is really where the baseline of our next level of services are going to be for our clients who are in the adult age. Because we’re looking for a lifetime of services that we’re starting to provide. We want to start with employment because employment is really the ground level starting place for anybody who wants to be independent and live in their community and have good wellbeing. Wellbeing is very important in our company of Catalight. We even designed our own wellbeing survey. So, that’s really the whole emphasis of what Catalight is and our employment work that we’re doing today. It’s just an extension of that into the whole life cycle of our clients.
Donald Taylor: What is Easterseals for people who maybe don’t know and what is the relationship between Catalight and Easterseals organizations?
Dan Middleton: Catalight used to be Easterseals Bay Area, and then we had some other name changes. It became Easterseals Northern California and then we did a merger with the Easterseals Hawaii company, and then we became Catalight. So, Catalight became the parent company of those two Easterseals. If anybody doesn’t know much about Easterseals, Easterseals is a national organization. There’s over 70 other affiliates throughout the country that provide all kinds of services for anyone who needs care. It’s not just for behavioral health services, it’s for veterans, it’s for seniors who are out of work. We cover so many different aspects of services for people with disabilities through the Easterseals national organizations. So we are affiliates of them through our two Easterseals.
Donald Taylor: Are there other organizations with whom Catalight partners? What can you tell us about their service models?
Dan Middleton: Yeah, the service providers that are going to probably be working with me the most will be employment type of service providers. Wise is an employment service, but they do more than just employment. They do other things. A lot of employment service providers do more than just employment because they have to have a sustainable company. So, they’ll do three or four different other services to blend them all together. They all look different. I don’t think I’ve ever met them all to be the same. That’s why I think the whole flexibility of how people have to go about this is very important. It’s not only important from, if you’re really looking at the person-centered approach here, it has to be flexible for that person, how they want to approach their job and their career. And these service providers all have those different approaches. They’re doing the same thing. They’re doing what’s working for them and what’s working for their people that they have as clients. It is such an interesting space that you don’t see in industries. You see people providing services like a smartphone. How many smartphones are there? There’s three different versions or four different versions. That’s it. You don’t have 20 different versions, and service providers, you have hundreds of different versions of them.
Donald Taylor: Tell us more about your work supporting employees and job seekers with preparing for work. What does preparation for work or job readiness really mean beyond just skills?
Dan Middleton: Yeah, it’s more about how to have a career and not just a job. A lot of people came to us over the last couple years when we were doing the research and said, I’m tired of just getting the job and then finding the next thing and next thing. It just became like a job hopping thing. So, we are trying to help people learn how to use all the resources that are available to them so they can gain confidence in themselves. Gaining that confidence helps them in their lifetime because it’s a really a lifetime of learning all these career skills that we’re trying to help people learn so they can have that opportunity when a chance comes up for another job or another opportunity, they’re ready for that job and they’re ready to take on that next opportunity. Because it is a lifetime of learning for everyone in their career.
Donald Taylor: Thanks, Dan. Can you tell us about some tools or resources that job seekers can use during their job search, and once they are employed, that can help build confidence and independence at work?
Dan Middleton: Yeah. We have a number of tools we’ve been using over the last couple years that really helped us develop the tool here at Catalight. The tool we’re going to talk about most of all is the Compass-Work tool. But we also have other tools we want to bring to everyone’s information so that we can share some other ideas that they have on employment integrators, and other personal websites that they can use to help them get things done. So, we’re going to talk about the Compass-Work tool to a pretty good extensive degree, but also the three companies. One of them is called the inclusively.com, mentra.com, and making-space.com. These three companies all have a unique way of presenting jobs to people with disabilities. The way they do that is they do an AI matching in the background of what the job is from these different employers to what the job seekers’ strengths are, to what their needs are for accommodations.
It does a better matching job than say LinkedIn or Indeed. So, we really try to help people focus when they’re looking online, these are the three companies to go for. Then the two other personal websites Let Me Do It and LifeSherpa. They’ve been out there for quite a while and Let Me Do It actually just won an award this past year. But there are more personal websites and apps that help people get their daily jobs done and their daily things and reminds them what their schedules are. So that’s more of a personal side of the space. We have other websites that we’re going to have the links posted on the page here for the podcast that you can take a look at.
Donald Taylor: Now let’s talk about career advancement. How can job seekers and employees manage their own career advancement?
Dan Middleton: That’s where at Catalight we actually developed a tool called Compass-Work. This is for the job seeker so that they can gain career skills that they need from assessments, defining what kind type of job they want, building the right resume, you know, asking for accommodations and how to ask for them. You know, different interview skills, how to attend in-person events, and then even networking. Networking is sometimes hard for people, especially folks with autism to get out there and just meet somebody. We also talk more about the online search and in-person searches. The last thing that is in the Compass-Work tool is probably one of the most important piece, and it’s having long-term career success. That is the hundred-day plan.
So really we’re looking for the long-term for folks. We’re helping them learn these skills of all the career planning skills I just mentioned, and bringing it together to the hundred-day plan where they actually have a set of goals that they’re trying to achieve over a period of time so that whenever the next opportunity comes up, they’re ready to take on that next opportunity. They’re better at doing all kinds of things within their company. So, here’s where we spend time on the hundred-day plan. So they get a new job and then with the hundred-day plan, they start working on themselves and what they want to achieve in that first hundred days. That’s when they get acclimated to the company’s procedures and their systems.
We have techniques in this tool for helping them understand communication styles with their colleagues and their supervisors. The hundred-day plan helps to document their SMART goals. Using the SMART goals technique really lays out something that is specific and if, you know, the word SMART spells out Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Results, and Time sensitive. That’s what SMART means and that’s where we have in the hundred-day plan things that people can actually link onto so that they can have that career. So, it’s a little bit different than if you would take a different approach to this hundred-day plan with a job coach. A job coach’s position is to help you in the first 30, 60, 90 days to get you situated with the company so you know what the daily tasks are, and then to work themselves out of a job so that you’re kind of independent doing your job, but they’re not going to be there helping you understand how to do communications and so forth. That’s more of a career coach.
So, we’re working to help job coaches understand that better. And then the last section, we’ll talk a bit more about some of the future things we’re doing to help job coaches and other types of quasi coaches do a different job for people in their careers. Then there’s three other tools I mentioned. They’re all in the Compass-Work tool, the inclusively.com, mentra.com and making-space[.com]. They’re all in this tool as a way to set up your profiles and set up the accommodations that you need so you can be successful looking for jobs. They all do that matching with accommodations. One of the companies Inclusively, calls them success enablers instead of accommodations. So just think of that different terminology. Companies are putting jobs out there to help you be successful in their job.
So they’re doing a matching process that makes it a better match for you to be working in their company. When you have that better match with an employer then you’re going to have a better success at your career. And then for the job coach, I think this will be probably in our later podcast in number two, we’ll talk about other tools for job coaches. There’s one tool I just became aware of called PathAble AI, and you can look them up on the link that we’ll provide you, but that’s another tool for job coaches to help them be better at their job so that they can provide better resources and they have different use cases.
Donald Taylor: Can you tell us about the hundred-day plan? What is it? Can you give us a brief rundown of the various parts of the one hundred-day plan that people work through? And how does it fit into the larger perspective of moving from jobs to careers?
Dan Middleton: Yeah, that’s a great question because the hundred-day plan is unique to career planning. It’s not something a job coach is going to come in with a schedule of what a hundred-day plan is. So, in the first part of the hundred-day plan, it’s the person getting more familiar with what is happening at the company and how their job is impacting the company’s results. So, learning about their systems, their procedures, learning how to communicate, learning how to set themselves up for success in the project they’ve got assigned to them, but they’re also getting ready for that second phase of the hundred-day plan where they’re now kind of feeling like they belong in the company. They’re going through, you know, the first 30, 40 days of work and now they start feeling like, oh, I got this thing figured out.
I’m now feeling like I belong and now I can start asking for the next things in my hundred-day plan. Like special projects I might be able to work on, so I can enhance what I am doing in my career, so I can find out new skills, and learn new things. That’s what the hundred-day plan asks them, the various questions and what do you want to do with that next set of time in your plan?
Then the last part of the hundred-day plan, which is very critical in knowing how your employee is doing, is that You Belong Assessment. So in the hundred-day plan, there’s a step that’s called the You Belong Assessment and asks them basic questions about how they feel they fit in the company because too many times when they’re switching jobs and going to another job, they don’t have time to even be acclimated into the company.
When you’re at the hundred-day part, taking this assessment will give you a good indication of whether you’re fitting with the company’s culture and the people that are working there and are they treating you like a regular colleague or are they treating you differently so they’re treating you like you’re a regular colleague like everybody else. Then you feel like you belong when everybody feels like they belong, that means you have a better opportunity for this job to last longer, to be into the next and get into another career in the long term. There’s really three sections of the tool and part of that is making sure that you have your SMART goals that takes you well beyond a hundred-day plan, in that sense.
Donald Taylor: What about the people and professionals that support job seekers? How can they familiarize individuals and employers with these tools so that they are understood and supported?
Dan Middleton: Well, we provide a lot of recommendations to service providers that are asking to use our Compass-Work tool. We’re also providing some training for those folks in how to coach their clients through the entire career planning process. So we’re not just giving them a tool, but we’re also giving them techniques for how to do coaching versus just say, telling them, do these three things and come back to me next week. We’re not in that process of doing that kind of work. We’re helping folks understand what do you have to do in the next two or three weeks in this job career planning process. Then two to three weeks later we’re asking, well, what did you do to get that work done? If they didn’t do all the work, well, what stopped you from doing that? What were the barriers?
Getting folks to uncover how they do their work and do their career planning process is just as important as learning the process and learning the techniques. That’s where a coaching style comes into play here because all these folks that we’re talking to, these service and these service providers, you know, job developers, job coaches case managers, they all have specific jobs. They all have specific things they’re supposed to be doing for their company. But whenever you put a coaching framework over top of it, it provides them an opportunity to provide better service to their customers and give their customers a better opportunity to have a career. That’s what we’re trying to do with this technique of the Compass-Work tool.
To that end, what Catalight has in plan for later this year is this certified Compass-Work Navigator program. So what it does, is it’s just a program where service providers can have their job coaches, their job developers, case managers go through a training program and learn how to be a certified Compass-Work navigator, which puts all those tools of coaching tools together with the career planning process. So, now they’re better prepared to help people have a longer-term career because they’re in for the long term. They’re not just in for the first 30, 60 days and have them being in their long-term planning with their client, it’s just going to give them a better opportunity to be supported. The last thing about that, having people learn more coaching techniques is to give them different opportunities to expand in their own job. These are what we call direct service professionals, DSPs, and the DSP community is a very large community of millions of folks providing services like this, but this gives them an opportunity to have a career within their own industry. That’s what we’ve been striving for at Catalight, is not only just to help the job seeker find that career, but also help the folks in the service providers find that career of their own and helping people find their career. It’s kind of a dual-edged sword. But we’re working hard to put those other programs together.
Donald Taylor: Dan, thank you for your insights today. Any final thoughts or recommendations for supporting job seekers with disabilities?
Dan Middleton: Yes, we want you to be out there gaining confidence in yourself and all the career skills that you think you have that you need to learn. Get access to all the tools. We have a whole list of tools that are on the webpage here that we want you to take a look at and use the ones that help you. If it doesn’t help you, just go onto the next one because there’s plenty of tools out there for everyone to use. When you’re getting help from other folks, advocates, or other service providers, let them know what you really need. Don’t ask them just to help you do a certain task. Ask them things that you need to be successful in this process and what your end goal is. If it’s a career, this is the best process to go through having that career planning process. Hopefully you gain confidence in learning more about this stuff today and I wish you luck.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the DETAC podcast. For more information related to today’s episode, including tools and resources mentioned by Dan Middleton, visit the DETAC website. Check back soon to join us for future conversations focused on advancing competitive integrated employment and economic outcomes for people with disabilities.
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This discussion was originally recorded on May 5, 2026.
This audio recording and transcript have been lightly edited for content and clarity.
Music for the DETAC podcast is an original composition and performance by Sunny Cefaratti, the Co-Founder and Autistic Self-Advocacy Mentor at the Musical Autist. You can learn more about the Musical Autist at www.themusicalautist.org.