- Hello everyone, welcome back to the next video
on this month's theme of Asperger's and employment.
And the topic you have chosen for this week is
Good Jobs for People with Asperger's.
So if you haven't already had your say by voting,
you can check out this link and have your say there
for next week.
So in this video, we'll be breaking a few stereotypes.
I'll be going through two essential qualities
of what makes for an Aspie-friendly job.
And then finally, I'll offer you my own personal tip
on how to find the right job fit for you.
Okay, so what are some of the stereotypes
that already exist out there.
I mean think of what were you expecting to see
when you clicked on the video that said
Good Jobs for Asperger's?
So some of the stereotypes are IT jobs,
technical jobs, programming jobs,
engineering, science-based, research-based,
all of the kind of jobs where a person is
usually working alone and usually a subject matter expert
really getting deep into their own special interests,
whatever that might be.
And I guess the first stereotype I want to break is
that what makes a job Aspie-friendly doesn't
actually have anything to do with the field
or the work itself.
It's more the conditions that go around that work
that make it either friendly or not.
So I know very successful Aspies who work
as lawyers and psychologists and musicians
and artists and what else, I'm basically just going down
the list of friends and thinking what do they do.
So what else?
Personal trainers, politicians, social workers,
basically any profession you can name,
there will be people on the spectrum
who do very very well in those professions.
So why do we even have these stereotypes, right?
Where do they come from?
Why do we have this idea that Aspies are best suited
for these kind of socially isolating technical jobs?
And I think that one of the reasons is this first
essential quality of what makes
for an Aspie-friendly job which is
that the job is performance based.
And what I mean by that is that the person knows
exactly what they're suppose to do
and they can be quite easily measured
to say yes you're doing a good job.
Yes, I'm doing a good job.
So the reason that that is so important is because
if the outcome and the product that you're making is
more important than how you get there,
then I can choose for myself how I get there.
So my boss might ask me to do something
and I will say great.
Can I do that in my own time, on the weekend,
standing on my hand with a blindfold?
And my boss will say sure, I don't really care
how you do it, I just want you to get it done.
And that allows for an incredible amount of flexibility
for the Aspie to work things around
and do things the way that I work best.
It's a huge amount of motivation
because all of a sudden work is actually fun,
and the performance that I am able to get
when I am able to actually control
those kind of environmental factors is huge.
So I get the ego boost of doing a really
really good job and being sure that I'm doing
a really really good job.
And finally, because I'm being so hyper-productive
and because it's so easy to show
how productive I'm being, I get the reward
that I deserve.
When I do a good job, I get rewarded.
So I'll give you a counterexample of that.
When I working as an engineer, I was basically paid
by the hour.
I was on flexi-time.
I had really good conditions.
But how the company knew that I was working was
I was filling in a timesheet, clocking in, clocking out,
and that was it.
So what I would end up doing is I would end up coming in
really early and I'd be in this zone
of hyper-productivity and I would work flat out
for six hours, and I'd probably get
like a week's worth of work done in those six hours.
But the problem was that at the end of those six hours,
my brain would be completely fried
and I wouldn't really be able to do very much else useful
for the rest of the day.
So unfortunately, because of the system,
I wasn't really allowed to go home after six hours.
I had to stay for my eight or 10 hours
or more depending on how much overtime
the people around me were working.
So what that meant was that when I came back
into work the next day, I hadn't had enough time
to recover which meant that the whole next day,
my brain was still fried, I was still in
this unproductive mode where I was reasonably useless
in terms of actually getting real results.
So that was a big disadvantage at work.
Fortunately for me, the quality of my work was
good enough that I managed to make sure that
that wasn't a problem.
But if I were in a situation where all
I needed to do was get the job done
and it didn't matter whether I took five days
or five minutes, then I would be able to make sure that
that flexibility happened and make sure that
I could do things my way and I don't have to explain
to anyone else what I'm doing.
All I need to do is prove to them that it works
by showing them the results at the end.
So that's first quality, having a performance-based job
makes it a lot easier to ask for flexibility
when you need it.
So the second quality is to have a communication culture
that is reasonably direct, honest, open to feedback,
all of those kind of things.
It's quite common for people on the spectrum to find
the intricacies of complicated social interactions
to be really difficult.
So I am bound to at some point annoy someone
or piss someone off or create some form of misunderstanding.
That's kind of like a given whenever I interact
with you know humans.
So if I'm in a workplace that has culture
that avoids conflict, that is really really hard
to come back when there is a misunderstanding
because I can't talk to anyone about it.
So there are essentially two reasons
why that culture is very important.
First it allows me more flexibility
in terms of just being blunt when I might not be
really sure how best to sugar-coat a message.
I know the message needs to be delivered.
I know sugar coating it is really hard.
But the message is really important,
but I don't want to offend anyone.
But in a culture where it's reasonably direct,
I can just say it and I know that the consequences won't be
too severe for me.
And the second point is the opposite.
When I do something wrong, I need others to know
that they don't need to sugar coat the message.
I just need the feedback 'cause if you don't give me
the feedback, I'm not gonna know what I did wrong
and I'm just gonna keep doing that thing
and keep pissing people off.
And if that goes on for too long,
then there's lots of secondary social side effects
of people not liking you, people unconsciously
ostracizing you, talking to you less.
And anyway, it snowballs out of control
if I don't get the feedback and if I don't get
the opportunity to try and stop doing whatever I'm doing
that pisses people off.
Or at the very least, if it's something
that I can't stop doing or something that I need to do,
we need to have that conversation
so that the issue is resolved one way or the other.
Okay, so with all that in mind,
my personal tip to help find a job fit
that's right for you is don't think
about this in terms of I'm an Aspie,
therefore I have a particular profession.
When looking for a job or a profession
or any kind of career direction,
you can basically go down two paths.
You can go down the path of I'm really passionate
about this subject.
I'm willing to work really really hard
because I am inherently internally motivated to do that.
Or you could go the opposite approach
of I am not particularly motivated to do this thing
but it comes so easily to me, right.
I am so much better at this than most
of the people in the population
that I can do a very highly valued job
for not really much of my internal resources
and get paid well for doing it.
And it doesn't need to be fancy.
I was talking to an Aspie at a support group meeting once
and he said at his job he is the guy who unpacks the crates.
And he loves it because it's so easy
and he can turn his mind off and no one else
at the company wants to do it because they think
it's boring but he thinks it's relaxing.
So that was perfect for him because it was a job
he was good at and could do really easily.
And on the other side, I know people who have had almost
no natural talent in a particular area,
but because they are so internally motivated,
they just keep working and keep trying.
They try so much harder than everyone else
that they end up doing really well.
So my philosophy on the whole purpose of work is that
we need to keep ourselves busy,
express ourselves some how, and be sustainable financially.
So you don't necessarily need to do all
of those things in the one job.
It would be amazing if you could get a job doing
something you're really good at
in an area that you're really passionate about
that also supports you financially.
That would be amazing.
But it doesn't always work out that way.
So I know for myself, there are some things
that I'm just really good at which means that
if I get some kind of performance based job,
I can spend a relatively small amount of my time doing
something that comes very easily to me
that is very valuable to someone else
that I get paid quite well for,
that means I'm financially sustainable.
And then I've got the time and the energy to follow
my passion and express myself and do all of those
other things in a different time that's not my job.
So that attitude has definitely served me well
in making sure I'm financially stable.
So anyway, I might leave it there for today.
This is an absolutely massive topic
and I've really only offered just a couple
of quick thoughts on that today.
Thanks everyone who voted for this topic.
There's still time to vote for next week's
employment themed video.
And make sure you check out my special live event
next week on the topic of getting a job
and keeping a job.
So I hope you've enjoyed this and I'll see you
again next time.
Okay, bye.