Growing up I only ever really had an insight into what it was like to be a teacher. Both of my parents and older sister did the job, so I gained a fairly good understanding of what it involved, much of which you wouldn’t see on a job advert for any teaching role. At school we received some careers talks from people who were encouraged to come into the school, and during citizenship we did look at some other careers. Over the last few months I have met with people with a huge variety of job roles, and it got me thinking about ways in which we could give people looking to access employment a clearer view of what a job actually involves.
For some of the autistic individuals I have met with, whom are looking to access employment, one of the key questions they have is to what a job actually involves, and by this they expanded to ask what happens in these jobs on a day to bay basis. During the mentoring sessions I am starting to look at different jobs, venues and areas of employment and working through to narrow down a list of places where the mentee may or may not wish to work. These conversations give a brief insight into a job role, but we would love to develop that further to support the people we work with.
For people looking to access employment, one of the key ways to learn about a workplace, is to experience a job for an hour/day/week and we would love to hear from businesses who would be willing to host people for a short period of time so they could see if this job would be suitable for them. There may be small job roles within your business which need doing, and you may be thinking that the hours are not long enough to justify the role, but we have people who are looking to gradually increase their employment and a few hours a week to start with would be ideal.
Alternatively, why not produce a video guide to your business showing what you do? TRACK can support you in preparing these guides; the video exposure will also be good on social media. This can also be a great way of getting to know your existing employees, and can lead to the production of one-page profiles which allow your employees to show the ways in which they can best work together and how they can be supported.
We believe that with small changes the workplace can become so much more accessible to people who want to work. From my experience the majority of autistic people do not want charity, they want opportunity. Work with us to help a create spectrum of opportunities which will benefit all of those involved.