- 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.
