Paper Title
Disability, An Advantage not a Curse
Abstract
Days are gone when people use to consider the disability as curse in humans but not anymore. Working with disabled, has already being explored by different industries all around the world. Many disabled people are sustaining jobs in different fields all around the world, however it is not very common phenomenon in textile and apparel industry.
They have been working in garment industry in non-technical areas such as data entry, helper, measurement checker etc. MAX fashion has started an initiative to employ hearing impaired in there retail stores as front executives, but not in technical areas.
As a trainer my goal was to train deaf people for technical knowledge in textile and sewing to compare as a quick learner and productivity enhancement to the normal workers, and to make them as a normal activist for manufacturing in the textile and apparel industry.
This paper analyses the outcomes of a study, which compares the learning of deaf and normal students in the technique of operating textile machines and sewing, acquiring abilities to work in the industry. After the study it was observed that productivity of deaf students was much higher than normal students due to following reason:-
• Higher focus and concentration lead to fast learning.
• Higher attention and concentration minimized the error factor.
• Focus only on work as there’s no noise distraction
However some disadvantage were also observed:-
• Due to fast learning they were not be able to maintain the accuracy and quality of the product initially.
This paper would be of interest to people exploring training methodology for disabled people, especially hearing impaired. It could also be used as an exemplar for technical skills development towards creating higher employability, especially for technical work like stitching or working in textile mill where maximum people work with ear muffs, as there is lots of machine nose.
Keywords - Hearing Impaired, Technical Skill, Concentration