Exploring Employment for Autistic Spectrum Adults - Introduction

This is the first of a series of posts I'm going to be doing here on autism and employment.

According to one study (Barnard et. al., 2001), only about 6% of all people on the autistic spectrum hold paid full-time jobs. My guess is that the actual number may be slightly higher when you figure in undiagnosed or undisclosed autistic persons, but even with that consideration, it is clear that atypical neurology and the modern workplace don't exactly have a consistently harmonious relationship.

I am one of those who is employed. I've had a full time job for about seven years now. I guess that puts me in the 6% figure, meaning that I'm presently one of the privileged few (relatively speaking). But it definitely hasn't been easy, and it does a disservice to autistic/disabled people everywhere to presume that if we have a job it's only because we must be "high functioning enough" to have one, when in fact our employment (or lack thereof) hinges on a complex set of factors just as it does for anyone else.

Furthermore I am not assuming here that every autistic person can work in a "regular" job -- the way things are set up now, a lot of people (of varying neurologies) can't work, and it isn't because they are "lazy" or totally lacking in skills. I don't think it's possible to be alive and conscious and have zero skills, for one thing, and for another, there are numerous people in existence right now who are contributing plenty to their communities in ways that do not fall into the category of regular paid work.

In any case, I know it is impossible to approach the subject of employment for a particular group of people without running up against deep, abiding questions about the very nature of employment, what counts as a "real job", what it means to have a skill, what it means to be "productive", etc. But since I am trying to write something reasonably practical (and readable) here, I am not going to delve too much into the "philosophy of work", nor am I going to try and deconstruct economics from the ground up.

Rather, I am going to try and share some of what I've learned in the process of navigating the world of work, in the hopes that maybe someone will find it useful.

Autistic job-seekers and workers very likely face certain particular challenges (in areas like dealing with interviews, communicating with co-workers, managing our time, avoiding burnout or health problems due to not realizing when we're tired or hungry, etc.) more often than nonautistic people do as a function of how our brains are wired.

But in the intersection where our brains meet the workplace, there seems to me plenty of opportunity for barrier-removal and examination of the factors that can contribute to our having difficulty. In this series I am going to discuss what some of those barriers are, how I've addressed some of them, which ones I'm still struggling with, and what things I think others might be able to potentially apply in their own situations.