Sixteen years later, little has changed

[sparrowrose]

I just read an article in the Columbus Dispatch about young people with Asperger's struggling to find and keep employment (I've included the text of the article below.) This article really saddens me because it's the same thing I went through at their age (although I was applying for lower level jobs and was a high-school drop-out.) Our education

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[cactus_rs]

In Sweden, there's a government organization (MISA, it stands for something but I don't know what) that helps place people with Asperger's/HFA in jobs, or in classes to develop skillsets to get jobs. The businesses they scout are aware that they're getting employees with, to borrow roleplaying terminology, unbalanced point spreads (lots of points in Intelligence, not as many in Charisma or Wisdom). Allowances are made as necessary.

My boyfriend-diagnosed ten or eleven years ago-was unable to finish gymnasium (analogous to high school) and futzed around with trade schools and unemployment for years. A friend of his got a job through MISA and recommended the program to him; now my boy works in a comic book shop and has worked there successfully for three? four? years.

Maybe part of a solution would be something like this top-down approach: either a government group or a private "recruiter" style organization that focuses on environments where autistics would do well, and finding autistics who mesh well with those environments. I don't think we have anything in the US like that, or at least on any kind of significant national scale.

I work a low-paying job out of choice, because I like it and I like my coworkers. There's a high tolerance for weirdness, which is good. While I was in Korea, the coworker environment for me was toxic for a while, as there was not the same tolerance for weirdness-the head foreign teacher was hypermasculine and almost aggressively extroverted. I got a very "I think you're weird and incompetent" vibe from him, as well as some of the others. As they phased out and new ones came in, things got better, but for a while I was very miserable. Had I not had a contract, I could see that situation snowballing into "I quit"/"you're fired" scenario.

That said, the job I work now (and worked prior to Korea) has been instrumental in helping me to add new "scripts" to my repertoire. I'm not a charming, witty conversationalist by any means, but watching my coworkers interact with customers for six years has done a lot to show me how everyone else does it. I can't pinpoint specific areas or techniques, unfortunately. Lots of observation and lots of practice are the only tricks I know. =/