WeCo: A Workplace Making a Difference-Individuals with Disabilities

At WeCo part of our mission is to create a place where people who live with disabilities can not only work but be inspired to succeed. Our Certified Test Team is comprised of a group of individuals who live with disabilities.

Many of these people are educated, sharp, and great learners, but they have struggled in the past to find a place of employment that sees beyond their disability. Our consultants are very enthusiastic as to why they love working with us. We sat down with one of our testing consultants, Charlene, and she talked about how different WeCo has been from her other experiences.

Charlene is a stay-at-home mom who is involved in many voluntary activities. She has had many different types of jobs, from painting crockery to accounting for a fast-food restaurant. Charlene appreciates the freedom that being a Tester gives her to work at home, especially given the difficulties involved in traveling because she lives with a motor skill related disability. She enjoys the WeCo culture and the opportunity to connect with other professionals living with disabilities who work at WeCo. When we sat down to ask her about it this is what she said.

We asked Charlene what she likes most about working with WeCo and she said, “I really like that I can be at home and do it. I didn’t have a vehicle for three years, which really hindered me in this job search thing… As a quadriplegic, I really like the easy accessibility to the job by just being here.”

Charlene continued to talk about her experience with WeCo by telling us what she’s learned since joining the team as a Tester, “ My learning has come from the times I’ve gone in and met the other Testers Just the little that I hear about their lives and what they have to deal with. It’s been very interesting to me. At a restaurant, I got to sit next to a man who was a quad, but he had even less function than I do… Most quads have an absolute break in their spinal cord. Mine was just twisted. So I’m kind of in between a para and a quad. And so it was interesting to sit next to him and hear that he was driving his own vehicle and that he had come on his own that day. I had been escorted by my husband. So, for me, meeting other Testers has been fun.”

WeCo is much more than a job to many of our consultants. Charlene’s experience is no different, this is what she said when we asked her what working with WeCo meant to her, “WeCo stands for the opportunity to have money to become a little bit more independent. Do to things like afford the car insurance and the gas, give gifts to my children,  take friends out to eat who have been very supportive of me. Independence, I guess. That’s what WeCo means to me.”