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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Employ four people for one job, the case for carving work into tasks
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, a panellist argued that autistic people are task oriented, that jobs should be broken into tasks shared across a team, and that steady contract work should count as employment.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Most of the employment panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium dealt with how to get autistic people through the door of jobs as they currently exist. One panellist questioned the unit itself. Jobs, the panellist said, are treated as one big blanket thing, so an autistic person reads the list of duties, finds the parts they cannot do, and decides they are wrong for the whole role. The proposal was to break jobs down into tasks.
The starting observation was about where autistic people already do well. Autistic people, the panellist said, have always been fairly good at thriving in freelancing, because a freelancer’s job is to complete a task and only that task. The panellist told the room that “autistics are known to be task orientated not job orientated”, adding that with a task the person knows why they are doing it. That linked to a point the panellist said had been made before in other contexts, that autistic people are often not told the reason behind what they are asked to do, and the panellist suggested this was one explanation for why many autistic people are not in the workplace at all.
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Sources the story draws on
- Employment for adults with autism spectrum disorders: A retrospective review of a customized employment approach (opens in a new tab), Research in Developmental Disabilities (Wehman and colleagues; abstract hosted by the VCU Rehabilitation Research and Training Center)
- The Buckland Review of Autism Employment: report and recommendations (opens in a new tab), UK Government (Department for Work and Pensions secretariat; review led by Sir Robert Buckland KC MP, supported by Autistica)
- Autism in Australia, 2022 (opens in a new tab), Australian Bureau of Statistics
- National Autism Strategy 2025 to 2031 (opens in a new tab), Australian Government Department of Social Services
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