People on the autistic spectrum offer genuine benefits to the workforce that tech companies are picking up on.
We know that career opportunities for people with autism are limited. As Helen Dyer from CASPA told me, some 85% of people with autism are not in full-time employment. The reasons for this aren’t hard to understand from a societal perspective: the way we hire people has a comical overreliance on one-one-one rapport and social cues – something that people with autism typically struggle with, to varying degrees of severity. The path to employment relies less on being able to perform a job well and more on being able to banter about doing a job well. In that respect, people on the autistic spectrum are at a natural disadvantage before they even enter the interview room.