Reasons for job loss: a review of employment termination studies of mentally retarded workers.
Workers with intellectual disability lose jobs mainly for social and responsibility slips, so teach and reinforce those soft skills every day.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sievert et al. (1988) read every paper they could find about workers with intellectual disability who lost their jobs.
They grouped the reasons into three piles: not doing the work tasks, not keeping work rules, and poor social skills.
The review did not test a new fix; it just mapped why people were let go.
What they found
Most firings were not because the worker could not do the job steps.
The big killers were being late, talking back, and small social slips like standing too close.
In short, soft skills sank more jobs than hard skills.
How this fits with other research
Milhem-Midlej et al. (2025) extends this story. They showed older adults with ID can learn job steps with tablet video prompts, but half lost the skill when the clips stopped. The 1988 review already warned that keeping the skill is its own battle.
Mulder et al. (2020) give a tool box. Their 2020 review says stimulus fading teaches new tasks to people with ID almost without errors. You can use their fading plans to teach the very social and responsibility skills L et al. flagged.
Hake et al. (1972) rings the same bell decades earlier. A child with ID ate neatly only while brief praise kept coming. When praise stopped, the spoon skills vanished. This small study backs the 1988 claim that ongoing support, not one-time training, keeps workers employed.
Why it matters
If you write job-coach plans, target social and rule-following behaviors first. Build in daily check-ins, not just front-loaded training. Use short praise or tokens to keep those behaviors alive after the official coaching ends. Pick one soft skill—like greeting coworkers—and reinforce it every shift for a month. You should see fewer call-offs and firings.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The current emphasis on employment preparation for mentally retarded people requires that more attention be focused on job retention. Knowledge of the reasons why mentally retarded workers were fired from their jobs could contribute to that effort. This article reviews studies over a 35 year period that have examined job loss in mentally retarded workers. First, reasons for job loss that relate to workers' vocational competence were separated from other reasons for job loss, such as economic and family factors. Then, reasons relating to vocational competence were classified into four categories: job responsibility, task-production skills, task-related social skills, and personal-social skills. Reasons for job loss among mentally retarded workers are broadly distributed across both social and nonsocial domains, including job responsibility factors such as attendance and punctuality, task-production factors such as inadequate quality and rate of work, task-related social skill deficits such as not following instructions and responding inappropriately to criticism, and personal-social inadequacies such as inappropriate dress, bizarre and aggressive behavior, and inadequate or offensive verbal repertoires. The results of the review are discussed in relation to training issues for job retention of mentally retarded workers.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1988 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(88)90049-2