The core mission of Autistry Studios is supporting the transition of ASD youth to whatever level of adult independence each individual is capable of achieving. Our Core Workshops and our new Drama Workshops prepare students for adult life by exercising and growing executive skills while building confidence and mental resiliency. These skills combined support real time decision-making and the ability to act on decisions – the abilities needed to successfully work and create.

Our existing Core Workshops include a range of activities that could be characterized as going from “play” to “playful work.” Last year, as Autistry grew to including a growing adult student body we felt a need for more direct employment training: An employment program which could be thought of as picking up from “playful work” and transitioning into “realistic work.”

Importance of Work

Meaningful work is how we establish our identity, maintain our independence, and construct a real relationship with our community. Without appropriate opportunities to work our students are denied independence, denied an adult identity, and denied a real place in our community.

Building the ability to work is fundamental to fulfilling our mission supporting transition for ASD youth.

Our programs have always been driven by the needs of the students with whom we work. Our students today need initial work experience in safe situations where they can explore and learn initial job skills, practice social skills, and cultivate their work ethic.

Initial experiments

Our first experience providing work was to have students work extra hours doing chores around our workshop areas. This was a gentle extension of their normal workshop schedule. This succeeded to some extent but highlighted requirements a more robust program would need to meet:

• Increased structure – more work hours per week.
• A mix of routine: repeated tasks in which deep competency can be built up as well as unique tasks exercising problem solving skills.
• Measured amounts of social interaction appropriate to the employee’s social skills.
• Work objectives that are real and meaningful to the employees.

Our new employment programs for Q3-Q4 2011

Based on the lessons we have learned and to the extent that funding permits, we will be rolling out several internal direct employment businesses to which Autistry students would be eligible to apply starting summer of 2011.

In the past these internal businesses would have been called sheltered work programs but the current trend is to call programs like these Social Enterprises. This is a wide ranging term for any program that applies capitalistic strategies to achieving philanthropic goals. In our usage we will be calling these new Autistry Studios employment projects Autistry Enterprises.

The goal of the Autistry Enterprises is to set up a cluster of internal businesses that feed business to each other as well as outside businesses and customers much as a Japanese keiretsu (network of companies) functions.

Autistry Publishing

A couple of our students are in the process of writing books which will be published by Autistry Studios. In addition to the direct processes of producing content, digital textblock, illustrations, and actually printing books we will be handling ISBN registration and setting up sales and delivery channels.

This Autistry enterprise will feed business into Autistry IT (website, e-commerce, technical support) and Autistry Figures (figure from the books) – both described below.

Autistry Railroad

The Autistry RR will produce model structure kits in cut-and-fold, cast plaster, cast resin, and eventually laser-cut wood and plastic formats. This company will employ designers working on CAD systems, technical writers/illustrators making instruction material, workers producing and packaging kit materials while maintaining inventory, and workers handling and fulfilling orders.

This Autistry enterprise will feed business into Autistry Publishing (printed materials, packaging) and Autistry IT (website, e-commerce, technical support).

Autistry Figures

Autistry Figures will produce customized figures in many formats. Some will be hand painted figures available commercially; others will be complete custom creations.

This Autistry enterprise will feed business into Autistry Publishing (printed materials, packaging) and Autistry IT (website, e-commerce, technical support).

Autistry IT

Autistry IT will provide computer hardware and software support to Autistry Studios and Autistry Enterprises. It will produce and manage websites for all the Autistry activities including e-commerce capabilities.

Next Steps

We have the resources to start the Autistry Enterprises but they will need significant direct family support to grow to a point where they can provide paid employment.

Courses are available in English and Spanish and four grades: Kids, Teens, Young Adults, and Adults. We are going to be drawing on these lessons and the great instructor guides (available as pdfs) to add a financial skills component to the transition programs we offer.

We would welcome any feedback about this program or other programs you have heard of.

This is unfortunate because people with ASD have skills that can be profitable for an employer. Our experience in Autistry Studios has been that there is an astounding range in skills and interests in the people we work with so generalities always have exceptions but there are some common threads that we agree with:

Strengths:

• good memory for details.
• ability to focus on a particular task for extended periods of time.
• comfort with structured tasks and situations.

Weaknesses:

• poor communication skills.
• poor social skills.
• discomfort with rapidly changing dynamic situations.

Again, these are very broad generalizations. Your mileage may vary.

I’ve worked my whole professional career with folks like this except we called them “software engineers,” “digital artists,” or “QA testers.” If this is so, why such a gap between the people I work with and people with ASD having trouble getting work?

The problem is that people who have been assessed to be on the ASD spectrum got there because their particular mix of strengths and weaknesses is acute enough that they encounter failure to perform well in “normal” circumstances.

What it takes to hire austistics and aspies is some assistance in the job seeking process and appropriate job assignments and delegation.

Appropriate jobs and their structure

I’m going to discuss the “appropriate job assignments and delegation” part first because there are some concrete examples handy.

This month’s Wired magazine has a short piece Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics about Thorkil Sonne’s company Specialisterne, a QA testing company Thorkil started to take advantage of the strengths of ASD workers. Here’s another article about Thorkil’s company at the Harvard business Review.

Thorkil’s business (a for-profit company) has a structured training process and takes time making sure each employee is in the right role and that their points of contact within the business and with customers are well managed.

In my business, while we do not overtly seek to hire people with ASD, we know that many of our employees prefer what we call “individual contributor” roles, small teams, a quiet workplace, and well defined tasks. As a manager I know that I will get the best work (and therefore best profit) if I take care in how people are managed. Internal business communication is largely handled by people who have stronger communication skills. We call them “Tech Leads” if they are also programmers and we call them “Producers” or “Project managers” if they are less technical. The Producers handle the bulk of the actual interaction with customers and the programmers by far prefer it that way.

I think these are models that could work in other kinds of workplaces.

The job seeking process.

Find a job, interview for the job, get the job.

Easy, right?

Actually, practically everyone knows this is a hard process. For people with ASD there are particular difficulties.

To find a job you need to hear about a job or read a job listing, imagine whether you could do the job and imagine whether you’d like doing that job. This is precisely the kind of unstructured imaginative creativity people with ASD can find very difficult.

To interview for a job you need to successfully put on a social performance – for a stranger. This part in itself is very stressful and can be a challenge. In the course of the interview you need to hear the questions the interviewer asks and deliver answers that simultaneously are: a) what the interviewer wants to hear; b)  cast a favorable light on you the candidate; c) truthful. This difficult communication challenge is beyond most people who have an ASD diagnosis unless the employer is incredibly accommodating.

I think a solution to the job seeking difficulties is to do something similar to what seems to work in the workplace: matching technical people with “people-skill” people. We could call these people “Recruiters.” By this I mean that a recruiting company that specializes in placement of people with ASD might be a good model to address this problem.

One of the recruiting firms I work with today meets with every candidate and they often escort the candidates to our office on interview days. In the event of a hire they escort the new employee to their first day of work. What I am proposing for ASD folks is that the recruiters stay with the candidate deeper into the process.

This needs some cooperation from the hiring firm but as an employer, if a placement firm consistently brings me good candidates — and even in tough economic times like now good software engineer candidates are scarce — I’m willing to be a bit more flexible.

Practical Next Steps

One of our driving principals at Autistry Studios is that our students and their parents teach us what is needed. We have initially focused on getting our kids ready for life, college, and work. We are increasingly feeling the push to extend our work into helping our students get work and successfully stay at work.

Here it is in PDF (Acrobat Reader): Preparing our Teens to Work

Besides the mini workshop we will be manning a table displaying some student projects and information about Autistry Studios. Several Autistry Studios parents and students have volunteered to man the table when Janet and I can’t be there.

Hope to see you there and we’ll take lots of pictures and post a report later this weekend.