- Subtitles section
- Autism is a developmental disorder that can affect how the brain processes information,
- People with autism have a spectrum of abilities
- and disabilities,
- Some are unable to speak or care for themselves
- while others can live on their own and have unique skills like excellent memory or attention to detail,
- No matter where they are in the spectrum
- many adults with autism have a difficult time finding a job.
- Even making it past a first interview can be challenging.
- But that may be starting to change.
- As we found out, more companies are discovering the potential of people with autism
- and, some are now actively recruiting for talent on the spectrum,
- Doing a television interview can be nerve wracking for anyone.
- But for people with autism, it's potentially overwhelming.
- Cameras, lights, microphones
- not to mention having to shake hands with a stranger.
- But last winter, before the pandemic
- five adults on the autism spectrum agreed to talk with us about their struggles finding work,
- I was unemployed for three years.
- I just kept receiving one rejection after the other.
- Eric Roland has a bachelor's degree in sociology.
- How many jobs do you think you applied for?
- Countless.
- I can't even count.
- About hundreds.
- How did that feel to get so many rejections?
- Well, I felt useless.
- I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere with life.
- Brian Evans and Philip Mitchell were diagnosed with autism as young children,
- Sarah Kleich and Brennan Novak, not until high school.
- How does being a person with autism make you different than a person who doesn't have autism?,
- Do you see differences?
- Oh yes, I do see differences from person to person.
- With me, for example, I'm good with numbers
- I'm good with mathematics.
- Differences in communication are pretty common.
- From what I've seen, especially with nonverbal communication
- like body language and stuff.
- What would you like people to understand about autism?
- The lack of or the ability to communicate
- doesn't equal intelligence,
- Clearly they have talents and skills.
- Dave Friedman hired Sarah and the four others at Autonomy Works
- a tech firm he started in
- to proofread digital content and manage data for dozens of companies like Nike and Nissan.
- There are thirty two adults on the spectrum here now
- working from home due to COVID nineteen
- including Friedman's twenty five year old son
- Matt,
- Let's try seven hundred, see what we get.
- Nothing beats sort of sitting in my office
- and looking over here
- and seeing Matt at work,
- And the job has really given him
- sort of, a whole nother purpose in life,
- Do you like the job?
- Yeah.
- I like that it's a quiet office environment.
- Do you remember getting your first paycheck?
- June the day, that's...
- Did you worry a lot about what would happen to Matt when he became an adult?,
- For a long time, we didn't.
- He's really talented with numbers, really good with detail.
- So we figured that there had to be jobs out there for him.
- What we found was horrifying.
- There are no jobs.
- A child with autism reaching eighteen or twenty one
- and suddenly it's, A cliff,
- People have talked about a cliff
- or graduating to their parents' couch,
- What ends up happening is
- they transition from a structured school setting into their parents' house with really very few prospects,
- Back in two thousand eleven
- I was, the idea for Autonomy Works came to Friedman
- when he was head of marketing at Sears,
- He oversaw hundreds of employees
- checking the accuracy of advertisements in newspapers,
- And the thought occurred to me, Matt could do this.
- This appeals to exactly the kind of way that Matt thinks
- and processes information,
- It's a lot of very small, detailed information.
- Yeah, it seems like a small thing.
- It seems like
- But, there's tens of thousands of dollars of costs
- that sit in that error,
- Autonomy Works employees monitor more than twenty three hundred websites a month for accuracy and quality,
- Friedman says their extreme attention to detail has led to a ninety percent reduction in product and pricing errors
- and they're so good at sustaining focus
- productivity is up thirty percent.
- I have a great memory
- and so when I do a task once
- I can usually produce it exactly the same way.
- Do you get bored?
- For me, I don't get bored at all doing our work.
- Part of it is the repetition.
- I can get into a rhythm with certain tasks.
- You like the rhythm.
- Yeah.
- If I was in a job that was constantly changing
- it wouldn't fit me very well
- because my mind would be all over the place,
- Not all people with autism
- would be able to work in an office environment like this,
- Centers for Disease Control estimates
- about a third of people on the spectrum have significant intellectual disabilities,
- Autism is a spectrum.
- It impacts people in a wildly different array of ways
- from people who are unable to feed themselves or care for themselves,
- all the way up to people where you would never even know that they were on the spectrum
- and can get through life without any sort of supports,
- At Autonomy Works, employees can wear noise canceling headphones
- and take breaks in a quiet room
- where lights are dimmed to reduce sensory overload,
- Friedman says, the most important accommodation companies can make
- is to change the way they interview applicants on the spectrum,
- For a person with autism
- the first fifteen or thirty seconds of an interaction are
- by far, their worst,
- They're high anxiety about meeting a new person
- trying to interpret interpersonal cues
- trying to plan out a conversation to have with that person.
- And those first fifteen seconds
- that's when the other person
- a job interviewer, say
- is making their first and lasting impression about somebody.
- Exactly.
- Hiring managers just aren't taking the time.
- To go past that first thirty seconds
- and understand the skills
- the talents, and the capabilities that exist within those individuals,
- There are complexities that are inherently inside of these very large data sets
- At the global accounting firm
- Ernst & Young, they've scrapped the traditional interview process for applicants with autism,
- They've replaced it with a series of problem solving challenges,
- And so if I can ask you all to come up.
- Testing aptitude, creativity, and teamwork.
- In a demonstration last February in Chicago before the pandemic required they work from home
- four current Ernst & Young employees on the autism spectrum were given millions of lines of data to quickly analyze and explain how they'd present it to a client,
- If we find that there are errors
- we can loop back over to this step.
- Ernst & Young has used this technique to hire dozens of employees with autism
- who work around the world
- in fields like artificial intelligence
- blockchain technology
- and cybersecurity,
- Is this about corporate responsibility doing the right thing
- being altruistic?
- Make no mistake about it
- this is absolutely a business imperative
- and it makes great sense from a business perspective,
- Kelly Greer, Ernst & Young's U.S.
- Chairwoman, says the employees they've hired have saved the company millions of dollars by looking at problems in a different way
- and creating algorithms to shortcut
- and automate processes,
- That is one of the things
- every one of our clients is focused on right now,
- How do they use data differently to create competitive advantages
- or to stave off vulnerability,
- And it is a very, very rare skill set in high demand.
- There's still so many people on the spectrum that are underemployed or unemployed
- and they've got this incredible talent
- that is going unused at the moment,
- This is a place where we could bring autistic staff.
- Last year, Vanderbilt University opened the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation
- a groundbreaking research center
- where scientists and others are developing tools and technology to transform the workplace for people on the autism spectrum,
- What subject did you most enjoy in school?
- They're creating computer simulated job interviews
- specially designed driving challenges
- and a block design test to help a company assess a potential employee's visual problem solving abilities,
- So people have done research on this for a few years.
- Maitali Kunda is a computer scientist at the Frist Center.
- So this is a wearable eye tracker.
- Right here and here are two little tiny cameras
- and they're actually facing inward
- and they're recording your eyes.
- The infrared cameras detect where your pupils are pointing.
- You can start as soon as I turn the page, so... Okay.
- Dan Berger, a data scientist at the Center who's on the autism spectrum
- volunteered to take the block design test
- to compare his visual problem solving abilities with mine.
- Great.
- For ten minutes, he assembled a series of increasingly complex block patterns,
- And go?
- Yes.
- Next, it was my turn.
- Dan made it look easy.
- For me, it wasn't.
- At this point, my head is hurting.
- Should it be hurting?
- I completed the puzzles.
- But Dan did them faster and was more efficient.
- How can you tell?
- Look at the square on the right of your screen.
- Dan methodically placed the blocks left to right
- line by line.
- And amazingly, he usually only had to look at the sample pattern once before placing a block,
- I wasn't organized at all.
- I placed blocks randomly
- and had to look back and forth thirteen times at the sample pattern
- before figuring out how to place the last block,
- My mind is a sieve, essentially.
- Like, I'm not holding on to any of that information
- so I'm constantly having to refer back to the original
- whereas Dan, he memorizes it.
- Yeah, it's very interesting.
- So it's a completely different way of processing information or trying to solve problems,
- Yes, yeah, it is.
- Maile Kunda hopes employers might use tests like this to more accurately assess the capabilities of people on the autism spectrum,
- You know, you imagine like TSA baggage screening is something that's super visual
- or when you're inspecting batteries coming off the line for quality control,
- So there's lots of different jobs that this is relevant for.
- The story will continue after this.
- In the model, we put things like
- Dan Berger's unique abilities caught the attention of Kayvon Stassen
- an astrophysics professor at Vanderbilt,
- His son is on the autism spectrum
- and Stassen helped start the Frist Center.
- Why did you want Dan here at the center?
- I brought him on board with my astrophysics research group originally because we were dealing with these massive amounts of data from space telescopes
- and, I needed help from someone who had Dan's unique talents to help us look for patterns in data,
- So, one of the skills that you have is looking at large amounts of information,
- I think my greatest skill is
- I see things differently from other people,
- This is a picture of the seven sisters.
- Dan's challenge was to make sense of data from NASA's Kepler telescope,
- His solution?
- He built an interactive software program called FilterGraph.
- Using Dan's software tool
- we were just able to slice and dice the data
- spin it around in different ways
- until something visually popped.
- This is a range of..., What popped was a breakthrough in astrophysics.
- Dan's filter graph produced a new way of judging the size and age of stars
- based on how vigorously they flicker in the night sky,
- Dan may be too modest to tell you
- but he is the inventor of record of this platform
- and NASA has licensed it.
- NASA is using filter graph that you invented.
- Yes.
- I mean, the brilliance that
- Dan, that you have, that's going to become increasingly important,
- There's only going to be more and more data coming down the road,
- And I feel like people who can understand the data
- that's going to be more important.
- There's a lot of people who are unemployed
- who are on the spectrum,
- Do you have any advice for them?
- Oh, gosh.
- I feel like there are a lot of strengths to being on the spectrum,
- And I think imagination is a huge key trait.
- So that's the kind of opportunity that we...
- We found about thirty large companies actively seeking employees on the autism spectrum
- including Microsoft, J.P.,
- Morgan, and Ford.
- But there are still so many people with autism who are unemployed
- and the numbers are growing,
- In the next decade, researchers at Drexel University estimate
- as many as one point one million Americans with autism will turn eighteen,
- Back at Autonomy Works outside Chicago
- Brian, Sarah, Brennan
- Philip, and Eric, told us they hope more companies will start to recognize the untapped potential of people on the spectrum,
- What does having a job mean to you?
- For me, having a job is important because it provides me with much needed structure in my life,
- Having a job is important to me
- because otherwise, I would become very financially dependent on my parent
- asking them, can you buy me this?,
- Can you buy me that?
- It's just been nice to be able to go home
- and talk to my parents
- about what I did during the day,
- They must be very proud of you.
- Yeah.
- They always say they're not surprised, so.
