Last year, four young people with Down syndrome had an internship at Moscow School of Management “Skolkovo”. For several months, they had been doing office work and learning how to arrange documents, prepare them for storage, operate a scanner, etc.
For Elvira Kladovikova, the practice resulted in official employment, and now the girl works at the Skolkovo School of Management as an assistant to a document management and archive specialist two days a week for 4 hours. She makes scans of documents and forms archival files, arranging them in folders by numbers and dates.
At first, the way from home to work was a certain difficulty for Elvira, so at first she was accompanied by volunteers and teachers from the Dunayside Up Charity Foundation. Now the girl herself goes to work by public transport using a visual instruction made for her by the foundation.
Elya is already fully accustomed to her workplace and copes with her duties on her own mostly, almost without asking her colleagues and her supervisor, document management and archive specialist Maria Ivanova, for help.
Both work colleagues and management treat the new employee very warmly and note her responsibility, perseverance and attentiveness. Elvira’s story is a clear confirmation of the fact that today the employment of people with Down syndrome in large companies has ceased to be a fantasy.
Photo by Zhanna Fashayan