Jobs for Aspergers? It’s more than just the job…

By: Jimi Wills

Since my relatively recent diagnosis of Aspergers, jobs have been on my mind.  Not just what might be the best jobs for Aspergers, but also thinking about the experiences I've had in the past.  Most of us have had bad times in employment, but even what most would consider great careers can be terrible jobs for autistic people.   

I've had the privilege of a university education, and with a lot of hard work I even got a PhD.  The constant geeking-out on one subject, and lone working - it was the path of least resistance.

But before university, I worked for two supermarkets/grocery stores: Kwiksave and Sainsbury’s.  In both jobs I was basically stacking shelves, which is a boring but in principle easy role. They were essentially the same job, but I reacted very differently to them.  In Kwiksave I felt great at the end of a day’s work, happy with myself and the world. At the end of a shift in Sainsbury’s I felt drained, confused and full of self-doubt.  I was clearly very switched on in one job, as I remember the names of all my coworkers, even 23 years on. In the other job, I was clearly struggling, as I don’t even recall my manager’s name.  

But why?

Looking back now, I realise that this was entirely down to management.  I remember Mr West, the Kwiksave Manager being supportive, understanding, fun!  He made sure I knew exactly what I needed to know, when I needed to know it, and that I had breaks when I needed them.  Bearing in mind that none of us knew I was autistic back then, this was pretty amazing. The truth is, he was like this with all the other staff too.  He was just a really great manager of people.

During my studies I worked part-time, including in a hotel and a store.

It was a trinket chain-store called The Natural World. It was dry, noisey, confusing and worst of all, company policy was at odds with law, meaning that we had a lot of dissatisfied customers.  The last straw was when I had to do my induction (I'd already worked 80% of the hours I would ever be offered!) and the contents of the induction pack were just wrong. It's a hard job for autistic people to gloss over the details of a topic and just go with the gist, and so when I had to answer questions about the products we sold, I did so with typical Aspie pedantry, figuratively ripping to shreds the inadequate training material.  I handed in my notice the next day, which is just as well because when she read what I'd written my manager blew a gasket and would have sacked me anyway.

In my experience, the suitability of jobs for Aspergers depends less on the job itself, and more on the environment and the care with which the individual is managed.  My hotel job was awful: dirty, smelly work with yet more dissatisfied customers, a high turnover of staff, and terrible wages. But management meticulously articulated their particular routines and the day had a reassuringly unbreakable schedule... breakfast, billing, cleaning, laundry, reception, ironing.  On paper, it's the worst job I've ever had and would be equally terrible for anybody, but in reality the best Aspergers job I ever had because of the explicit structures and routines!

Before getting what academics call a “proper job” (I think most of them don’t realise that this is supposed to be an ironic phrase) I worked every job from farming to data-entry.  But after my PhD I started in a laboratory role, and my only part-time work since then has been occasional free-lance consultancy. 

I started off as a post-doctoral research associate working on interpreting and mining data from mass-spectrometry in a biological context.  I collaborated with other scientists, which basically means we geeked-out together, and I spent a lot of time on my own developing algorithms and computer programs, processing workflows and automations to aid the lab in which I worked.  In collaboration with some real biologists, we published one of our approaches and its application in the top journal Cell. Up to this point, being a postdoc was great!

But this is when things started to go wrong for me. After our Cell paper, I was invited to write a review on machine learning, a core tool in our approach. I still didn’t know I was autistic, but I knew I wasn’t comfortable writing about things I felt I wasn’t expert in.  And no matter how much I read, I just didn’t feel I understood enough about the topic to present myself as an authority on the subject. I guess scientists not as far along the spectrum might just fake it until they make it. But for me, any job requiring blagging is not a job for autistic people.

So I transitioned to a support role, mass-spectrometry laboratory manager, in which there is less pressure on me personally to publish.  There’s a mix of technical and academic work but also customers and politics. 

I actually have no problems interacting with people, especially as many of them show signs of being on the spectrum.  Academia seems to attract neurodivergent people. But what I wasn’t ready for was the specific way things have changed in the place I work.  From changing management structure to laboratory renovations, it all uses up my spoons (you’ve heard of spoon theory right?) Because I’m providing a service to people, I cannot simply take the time I need to recover from these events, and the ever-changing environment and constant demand on my time has driven me to the point of mental ill health.

Since my diagnosis though, I have been able to ask for adjustments at work, the main one being allowed to wear headphones in the lab to listen to music (which is normally against H&S policy)  This helps me regulate my emotional state, but it’s not enough.  

In transitioning from postdoc to lab-manager, I thought I was moving into a better job (starting to suspect I might have it), but the environment has made it worse not better, and good management makes it barely tolerable.  Still, knowing what I now know, I would definitely consider the same role in a different environment.

You see, whether a job is good for autistic people seems to have less to do with the work itself and so much more to do with the environment and management.  Perhaps you hate your current job, but that same job might be a great job for aspergers in another context.