Autism and Advanced Manufacturing
Starting in 2020, Spero Career Canada delivered a one year exploratory project focusing on neurodiversity in advanced manufacturing and trades. We wanted to determine if neurodiverse individuals would be interested in these roles and where employers were at in terms of hiring neurodivergent individuals. The project findings were enough to secure funding for another project with NRC / IRAP support.
This project is through our not for profit SocialliiASD which focuses on delivering social networking and employment skills building programs.
There is an 85% unemployment rate for the members of the autism community who are willing and able to work. While the stereotypical roles for autistic individuals includes IT roles and data entry, we believe the advanced manufacturing sector (AMS) could benefit from accessing this talent pool.
Why focus on the autism community to solve this problem? Many members of the ASD community possess certain characteristics which would make them prime candidates for roles in advanced manufacturing such as:
- Good with repetitive aspects of work
- Desire to deliver high quality service
- Problem solving skills
- Interpersonal skills: able to work on a team
- higher levels of productivity on the job
- job commitment
- higher levels of education
- attention to detail
What did we learn?
