| Background: |
In the last 20 years, Customized Employment (CE) has joined Supported Employment (SE) which has its roots traced back to approximately 1980, as a popular employment intervention. SE became codified originally in the Rehabilitation Act of 1986 through Title 6?C, dedicated exclusively to funding SE, along with the primary source of all rehabilitation funding, Title 110, for basic employment services. CE began to receive much more attention when the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (2014) was passed by Congress and CE was codified along with SE and numerous other priorities.
We are writing this editorial because there has been increasing amounts of confusion and debate among rehabilitation and other disability policy makers and practitioners, as well as advocates and clients, as to how these interventions differ; how effective each is; how much overlap exists between them, if any; cost associated with each; and, above all, the research evidence supporting each. This will be a bit of an unusual editorial in that we will not pose only opinions but do our best to highlight evidence based research that we think may help in the overall thought process when evaluating the two interventions. |
