I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon attending an Autism Awareness at Work event this week. This was organised by the Newcastle Children’s Charity Smile for Life. It was an event designed to highlight the skills associated with autism, and also to give businesses the chance to find out how they can support staff, colleagues, customers and clients with autism.
We were shown into the event by young ambassadors from the charity, all of whom have autism, who answered our questions and gave us an insight into how autism affects them.
The statistics
Recent statistics show that 700,000 people in the UK are on the autism spectrum, and yet just 21.7% of adults with autism are in full or part-time paid employment.
Meanwhile, individuals with autism generally are generally much less likely to be employed than people with almost any other recorded disability:
An insight into autism
Many businesses from the North East came along to this event to find out more about how they can benefit from having employees with autism. Phillippa Chaplain, an independent autism advisor and trainer, gave an insight into behaviours, challenges and attributes of people with autism. Some of the audience were surprised to hear that it was often easier for boys to get a diagnosis than girls who may be “masking” their autism. She also busted a common myth that people with autism cannot empathise. She advised the audience on some tips for communicating with those with autism. These included avoiding using ambiguous language such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” and giving adequate processing time (“the ten second rule”) e.g. after asking a question.
Café Beam in Gosforth
We then heard from James Middleton, who has autism, and is employed as an apprentice chef by Smile For Life at the charity’s Café Beam in Gosforth; He described the difficulties he had faced at school where he felt they hadn’t met his needs as a child with autism: “they just saw me as someone who misbehaved”. Thankfully when he went to college things started to go in the right direction. He signed up for hospitality which also gave him life skills and confidence. He describes Cafe Beam as “one of the best places he could have gone to”, providing him with lots of help and support. He ended his presentation by saying:
“I want to stay strong and happy till the day I die”.
This inspiring speech clearly moved many people in the room.
Bringing strengths to the workplace
As a Speech and Language Therapist who works in the field of autism, I certainly agree that people with this condition have many strengths to bring to the workplace. For example, people on the spectrum tend to have great attention to detail which makes some IT companies specifically headhunt them. Likewise, having expert knowledge in an area of special interest can make someone very employable. I would urge all businesses to seriously consider employing people with autism – they have such a lot to bring to the workplace as this event highlighted so well.
