Vision Trade Centre
– An EU-Equal project for the integration of future labour resources
Let’s work together!
This project aims to demonstrate an idea that is new for European business:
"Comprehensive rehabilitation on normal labour market terms for
the visually disabled and others"
The idea is a Business House (Vision Trade Centre)
A financially independent economic unit which combines business with job training.
Business foundation
With customer service as the foundation of its business, Vision Trade Centre is building and already operates a combined business and training facility that:
1. Offers, produces and delivers professional telemarketing services for the business community.
2. Places well-trained staff with business companies.
3. Offers training and upgrading for company staff in close collaboration with companies.
4. Gives work and job mobility to the visually disabled and others with handicaps
5. Is developing a national/international learning model
Vision Trade Centre (VTC)’s expertise
Disabled people are a valuable labour resource on equal footing with others, so they have the same capacity to share in the quality of life associated with an active working life.
Vision Trade Centre has developed out of a well-functioning telemarketing company, TeletradingHouse and the Telemarketing Job Training at IBS-Business, which is part of and based at the Institute for the Blind and Partially Sighted at Hellerup in Denmark.
The company has established itself on the market over the last ten years by employing visually disabled staff.
Today the company and its training facility have a widely recognised expertise as a job training and education centre for telemarketing consultants and customer service staff in collaboration with the Danish business community.
Based on this experience, Project Vision Trade Centre was applied for and granted by the European Social Fund – Objective 3, Equal: The socially marginalised.
The Government’s focus on people with disabilities shows the perfect timing of this project:
”People with disabilities are a valuable source of labour power – much too valuable to be overlooked. That is expensive, both for the community and the individual. So we need to put some focus on helping the disabled into a wide range of jobs. With relatively simple measures, still more could do well on the labour market.
So we have a long-term employment strategy. The aim of this strategy is to get more disabled people into work:
• The number of disabled people in employment has to rise by 2,000 per year.
• The proportion of companies that have disabled employees has to rise by 1 % per year.
• Both companies and the disabled themselves have to have more information about the opportunities for employment and the opportunities for subsidies and aid that can compensate for the handicap”.
"Many of us never consider that we see with the brain and heart. If we become visually disabled, our options for communication change, but that does not change who we basically are as people".
This project is just one of the many initiatives needed to fulfil the government’s aims.
Vision Trade Centre works in collaboration with publicly recognised companies
The people behind the project have clear aims: To convince the business community through the power of example, and thus open the way for new opportunities.
The project is headed by a board recruited from companies whose activities and profiles reach out to much of the community. And the project’s ethical audit is clearly consistent with its social responsibility.
The project grant puts us under an obligation. The Vision Trade Centre’s operations and profits have to be a “shop window” for European companies in general and for Danish companies in particular.
Vision Trade Centre has vision
Vision Trade Centre is an epoch-making project in several ways. Its primary function is to show that people with a sight disability can work as part of a team with others at widely differing levels: permanent jobs, job training, staff upgrading, and specific education – all in the same place.
Vision Trade Centre is a concrete demonstration of the value of disabled staff as a labour resource.
VTC is a knowledge centre where employers can see and learn.
VTC is an inspiration centre that generates changes of view about staff, working methods and results.
VTC is an example of how the learning process itself creates innovative development and tools.
VTC is an educational concept that leads to employment, because it creates optimally conducive conditions.
Vision Trade Centre is first and foremost good business
– and therefore socially rational.
A Call-Centre is defined as a facility that in varying degrees takes care of client companies’ sales, information and customer services. Its basis is the fact that many sales and service functions can be centralised and carried out via telecommunication – irrespective of where in the country, or the world, the call comes from.
Such outsourcing gives the client companies a competitive advantage in terms of resources
