Does anyone have insight into this? I’m looking for advice, links, ideas… anything to encourage my brother (22) to start thinking about work. He has some understanding of computer repairs (not coding) e.g., fixing a fax machine. He has no qualifications. He started a computer repair course, but the course was discontinued before completion, and this set him back substantially.
For the last year., he’s stayed in his room most of the time, learning japanese - and struggles to leave the house. He would like to be self-employed, but doesn’t have a business plan.
My mother owns a small field and outhouses - she has a vague idea about starting a ‘glamping’ site. - My mother has no experience in running a business.
…not much information to go on, I’m sorry. Perhaps somebody has some bitesize, small and obtainable steps to help encourage my brother into the world of work?
I’m new here. I didn’t know where to post this thread. Perhaps this is the wrong section? - Sorry if that’s the case.
This company only hires people diagnosed with Aspergers. Unicus. The do testing and quality assurance work on software, extremely detail and procedure-oriented work. They feel that people without Aspergers would be difficult to get to the level of accuracy the testing requires. I don’t think the location is any good for you and you’ll have to use google translate on the site, but it might give you some ideas about what areas Aspergers may be an asset in, rather than a liability.
Does your brother have a high school diploma or GED?
(This will help us understand what basic job requirements he can meet.)
Did he manage to learn any Japanese so far?
(Maybe there’s some possible work there, like translation or transcription jobs.)
Is he detail-oriented? Able to focus - or obsess - on a task until it’s complete? Can he express himself in writing? Does he have a good speaking voice & phone manners?
(The answers to those Qs can help suggest, or weed out, jobs like tech support or document processing.)
**Qualifications **
He has a few GCSEs (tests kids take at 16) - Mediocre grades. He started his A-Levels (tests to get into university), but struggled with the social side of college and dropped out. If he wanted to, he could do a foundation degree - but this isn’t appealing, atm.
Did he manage to learn any Japanese so far?
He can say a few things…
…Probably up to a my level of french - Je ne parle pas beaucoup français. Où est le bar? etc, etc
Is he detail-oriented? Able to focus - or obsess - on a task until it’s complete? Can he express himself in writing? Does he have a good speaking voice & phone manners?
When he wants to be. He can obsess, and that makes him detail orientated, currently very keen on japanese knife sets! He’s risk adverse - for example, he knows how to build a computer, but won’t just in case a component won’t fit. At his age, I probably would have taken that risk by actively searching for cheap parts and researching what fits with what.
He has a good way with words, but mumbles, and struggles to cope with other people’s nonsense - he couldn’t cope with office politics (nor can I - but I hide it with mild passive aggression and platitudes).
He’s polite and pleasant face-to-face, but avoids people. He’s good with repetitive tasks, and has shown discipline in working alone, e.g. his Japanese.
Has he ever had a job before? If not, he may be best off looking for the sort of work that requires absolutely no experience, like retail or food service. Once he builds up his resume doing some basic stuff, then he can look into more permanent, higher paying, etc. jobs.
Yeah, suggesting a risk-averse Aspie introvert start working in retail or service is like suggesting that the Dalai Llama start learning to be assertive by pulling people’s toenails out. That’s a quick route to deciding work is just entirely out altogether.
That said, there are retail-adjacent jobs that he might like. Stock-room workers work at odd hours when there aren’t lots of people around, and have methodical and organized requirements that aren’t generally too complex or difficult.
If he is able to drive, a delivery job could work well if he has an area where they are mostly drop-offs instead of hand-overs.
Filing or processing medical/legal papers? Probably needs a background check.
You could also look into local aspie/autistic service agencies. Sometimes they offer employment placement services or even might have jobs that people could do with their own agency to get started.
As for your mom, unless random people are already camping on her property regularly, and the property is within 20 minutes of a city center, any sort of campground is going to be a hard sell, and specifically the ‘glamping’ campground idea is probably not going to fly.
‘Glamping’ is even harder to manage than running a regular campground, because these people are going to have high expectations. They will want climate controlled private cabins, they will expect ample electricity and wi-fi internet along with unlimited hot water, they’ll likely expect bed-and-breakfast style meals, and THEN on top of that they want beautiful trails and ‘hikes’ that are short and easy and well marked and show them beautiful scenery with little effort or skill level or time required on their part. THEN they will expect there to be ‘quirky’ restaurants and shopping places close by (or even run by the campground) for the afternoons or rainy days, and to be close enough to a city center to Uber in to get drinks and dinner somewhere nice in the evenings.
Re. my mum, she lives near a few major cities, a few big and well established festivals, good walks, lots of ramblers and bird watchers, etc, etc. Hmm, some of the best walks are 30 mins drive away - not ideal. The out buildings are not wired up, but they could be - that could be a job for my bro. But the wi-fi is sketchy, and I have no idea about the plumbing side of it. He’s put insulation in them. He liked doing that. Really, I know it’s a risky, silly idea, but I like it - it gives him the chance to work from home - and something that would be there for him, regardless. But then, regardless of all the issues you mentioned above - I dunno.
“Follow your dream” is only good advice if your dream is to work hard and save harder. For most people, it’s finding a job for which you have an aptitude and then working at it. During his time at school, he surely should’ve been tested/counseled to find out what he’s best suited for.
It sounds like your brother needs motivational help getting started. Possibly counseling by someone who specializes in autistic life skills. Maybe even a group home situation, which would get him out of his bedroom. Understanding that every job isn’t going to be for him doesn’t mean that he gets a free pass. He’s an adult, it’s time to start adulting.
And it sounds like your mom needs a reality check.
It sounds like the OP is in England, and I’m sure there would be some kind of vocational rehabilitation program in his area. I’d contact them and go from there.
Wal-Mart and grocery stores around here have night employees who stock shelves, that’s all they do. Wal-Mart likes to hire people with disabilities, it makes them feel like they are helping. The door greeter at my local Walmart is semi famous in these parts. Take him to the job corps or employment office, they should have some info.
There’s a company called Specialisterne (specialisterne.com) that helps other companies hire people on the autism spectrum or with other conditions. They have locations all over the world. Evidently face blindness counts: on Tuesday I am going to a ‘discovery workshop’ put on by them to help Accenture evaluate potential job candidates.
Funny you asked. I was an Aspie child during WWII, before Herr Doktor Asperger was even borh to diagnose me. Like all children with “learning disabilities”, we wee just thrown into the general school population to figure out how to get along in the social world. Sink or swim. Nearly all swam, a few didn’t and needed more aggressive therapy.
I never even heard the word Aspergers until I was about 60, and I had a google to explore, and I said holy crap thats me. Then was when I understood that I had, over the decades, successfully figured out a lot of things for myself and learned (sort of) how to fit in. The importantg thing is I was always treated as normal. Nobody ever singled me out and put me in a compartment and said “You have a condition you need to be treated for”. So I never acaquired the dependency, and had to find ways to deal with myself in my own way.
I had all the successes and failures everyone else had, in school, in jobs, in marriages. . Some of the failures were due to autism. So were some of the successes. I’m OK with my life. I’m OK with being blind, I’m OK with being autistic. It’s who I am. One can learn to do the workarounds.
Having Asperger’s is a lot like living in a country where people speak a foreign language, and you never really master it. But you get by.
Not necessarily, in the UK; most of our big tourism areas, where these sort of things do well, are rural, with only a few near cities. They’re mainly places like Devon and Cornwall; places with good scenery, rather than somewhere near a city, people here tend to put the emphasis more on ‘getting away’ and relaxing in the countryside. If you check out this Glamping booking site, note how almost every advert emphasises ‘heart of the countryside’, or similar. Only a few mention that they’re near a city.
I’m not saying location isn’t important, it obviously really is, but the size and crowded nature of the UK means what’s important here is different to the US.
You do need to be near an area with existing tourism, and have good food places nearby if you’re not planning on catering onsite, but every village has at least a pub, and most do decent food (since drink driving laws started getting enforced, most rural pubs more or less rely on food sales), and you’re never more than a few miles from one unless you’re in the Scottish Highlands.
No one would expect climate controlled cabins in the UK, it’s just not a thing here, a heater or fireplace yes, but not air con, there’s no need in this climate. There’s a selection of ready made ‘glamping pods’ available, with decent insulation.
I’m currently working part time in some holiday cottages; a similar market, but with the added costs of full size buildings. They are all self catering, as are most of the ads in that link, there’s no food available on site. There’s one pub within walking distance, which does good food (owned by the same people who own the cottages), a few short wildlife walks, a kid’s play barn, and a small town 20 minutes away. Every other place of interest is at least a 40 minute drive. There is a local taxi company, not Uber (I don’t think I’ve seen one of those within 2 hours of here) but they don’t seem to get much use. The nearest city is over 90 minutes drive, but most guests come from much further away.
The place does really well. This is the quietest time of year, but they’re still about 1/4 full, and they’re currently expanding.
If you were thinking of going that route, OP, I’d suggest trying a simple camp site for a bit first. The start up costs and time involved are far lower, and anything you do build can be revamped and used for a glamping set up. You might find you really don’t like having strangers around, with random demands at all hours.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk might be a good resource. As a permanent work source it’s not great, as a great deal of time can be wasted just finding viable listings. But as a no-risk place to try out different “work-from-home” options it’s marvelous. And he’ll earn a few bucks in the process.
As someone who went through the same sorts of struggles, I would say the key is to find an autism support group that specializes in finding employment. It helps a whole lot when you’re looking specifically at employers that want people with Asperger’s instead of them being put off by the rough social skills and lack of experience. He might be capable of many great things if he finds some niche that he’s very good at compared to the general population. Similar to me, it seems like he is not bothered by repetitive tasks that accomplish something, and that’s a big leg up on the general population in production-style jobs where he may be able to keep up production by simply not getting bored. I worked for a bit at a cell phone repair place that worked at such a scale that you had plenty of the exact same tasks to be repeated hundreds of times per day, but since each phone had a different user experience before coming in for repair, you had to be aware of a lot of different things that might be going on. Plenty of people were not particularly happy about the repetitiveness, especially since it wasn’t perfectly repetitive, while I found it rather engaging and didn’t have a problem doing two to three times as much work as other people when set to tasks where such a thing was possible.
I then went back to school and got an accounting degree and am a few weeks from getting my CPA license after having an autism support organization find me a job at a small firm where they wanted someone who would do all the grunt work and didn’t care that I had no desire to interact with clients. He might not quite be academically gifted enough to be able to pass a licensing exam for chartered accountancy in the UK, but a lot of what I do it’s completely unnecessary to have that level of understanding of the work involved. Of course they also put me on tasks that are intellectually rigorous when they arise (I’m much smarter than the other accountants there), but if they hadn’t found someone as sharp as me, they certainly would still have work for someone that was mostly data entry and clerical. I’m not sure what the accounting world is like in the UK though, but from my exposure to Monty Python it seems like chartered accountancy is seen (at least in comedy) as full of people similar to him.