Introduction

In order to address the challenge to include or prevent exclusion of persons with disabilities or long standing health problems in the labour market, the role of a key broker between the individual and the employer is crucial. Therefore the different national projects, united in the transnational project RETAIN, developed a local intermediary role to advise, support and train the employer and the disabled employee towards (re)employment. The intermediary role varies according to the focus of the different projects.

Country	Project	Intermediaries
UK	Workforce Futures	Case worker (Croydon Reintegration Pilot) provides re/integration support to individuals with mental health or physical disability issues whose employment is at risk or who have recently lost their employment due to a sustained mental and/or physical health problem.
Belgium	Intro_DM	Disability Case Manager (Intro_Dm Reintegration Pilot) offers individual support in close cooperation with all involved parties, within the reintegration and job retention process for persons with a long standing health problem or disability.
Italy	Ex-Aequo	The Social intermediary has the role to promote, to realize and to supervise the process of integration and re-integration of the mentally disabled person.
Italy	Ex-Aequo	The Company tutor is the person responsible for the technical training of the mentally disabled person, having the role to support the process of integration at a company and social level strengthening relationships with employer and colleagues.
Poland	ZORON	The Trade Union member, (trained by ZORON) represents interests of disabled employees. He acts as (1) the guard of disabled employees’ equal rights; (2) the management adviser in the line of issues connected with employment of these people; (3) the adviser for the employers of disabled persons

The primary goal of the RETAIN project was to develop a joint competency framework for the role and key tools of intermediaries supporting disabled employees and employers in connection with integration, reintegration and job retention. This competency profile should be suitable for use in other countries.
During the work in the theme group ‘Competence framework of Intermediaries’ the group came to the conclusion that it was not desirable to develop just one joint competency framework. Discussions about including or excluding specific competences kept going on.

After discussing this process the working group changed its focus. Building a document that is a guideline ‘for organisations wherever in Europe dealing with disability and (re)employment and working on the competence profile of an intermediary’ was set as the new goal.

This document is set up as a guideline and provides several concrete examples of competency profiles of intermediaries.