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Lesson overview

• Exploring options
• Evaluating options
• My areas of opportunity – common between motivation, interests, strengths, experience, where there are more factors suited to my strengths and fewer barriers – these are potentially really god jobs for me are
• Skills, qualifications
• Skills/experience/qualification gaps

Exploring options

With All About Me you have explored various aspects of your personality, your interests and some of the differences and barriers you may have encountered. This may help you to start exploring where your skills and interests could lead you.

If you haven’t yet choose a career or the industry you want to work in, you may want to explore the options.

If you already chose your career it can still be useful to explore options if you are considering portfolio career or want to explore alternatives.

There are skills audits online that can help you to come up with a range of choices.

Below we listed just some of such websites, but others are also available.

National careers service https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/skills-assessment

Neurodiversity skills profiling app https://profiler.app/nd-app/

CareerSmart https://careersmart.org.uk/tools/career-test-skills-audit

FutureLearn https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/career-smart-sell-yourself/0/steps/25059

How-to-change-careers https://www.how-to-change-careers.com/personal-skills-audit/

Make a list of your options, trying to have no more than 7. However you should remember that online tests like this have their limitations options they suggest are both incomplete and could be wrong for you. We advise to explore these online tools with another person whom you trust and who knows you well.

Evaluating your options

Research your shortlisted career options

If you are exploring a new career it may help to talk with people who work in that career or industry to understand what is it like. It is also helpful to talk to other autistic people who experienced or researched this career in the past.

One good way to assess the suitability of a career for you is to seek advice on the forum or other social media.

Some of the aspects to consider are:

• Are your strengths utilised
• Is the sensory environment suitable and how easy it is to mitigate triggers
• Communication requirements.
• Pace, targets, etc.
• How employee performance is judged
• Company cultures

Consider carefully these environmental factors and make a shorter list of career options. Try not to exceed 5 options. If you already feel some careers are not suitable for you, drop them now. Do not necessarily exclude the options that require experience or qualifications that you do not have, you could evaluate them in the next stage. Right now, shortlist the options that appeal and feel right for you.

Evaluating career options

1. Ranking based on strengths
   Rank your options in terms of utilisation of your strengths, from highest utilisation of strengths to the lowest.
2. Reranking based on presence o triggers and barriers
   Consider the options in terms of presence of negative triggers and barriers, Do any options draw a lot on your differences and weaknesses while other options don’t? Rearrange the options to reflect the effect of barriers with the option with highest use of strengths and lowest presence of triggers and barriers on top and the option with lowest usage of strengths and highest presence of barriers at the bottom
3. Don’t worry if you are unsure, this is not an exact science and it is OK to keep some options on equal level. Just reflect the differences that are obvious for you. Put on top what feels right and at the bottom the option that feels wrong.
4. Now let’s look at your interests and aspirations.
   Rank your shortlisted career options based on your interests an aspirations (ignore the ranking based on strengths for the moment) , from highest usage of your interests to the lowest.
5. Now let’s plot your options on a graph.

On an A4 sheet of paper draw a coordinate system with a vertical line with an arrow pointing upwards and a horizontal arrow pointing to the right. Label your arrows with as many notches as you have options to consider. See the example with  5 notches on the picture.

Now plot you shortlisted career options on this coordinate system based on your rankings. On the vertical axis use your ranking based on strengths and barriers and on the horizontal based on your interests and aspirations.

Plot your career options in this coordinate system based on the ranking you made.

Draw a vertical line in the middle of your horizontal axis and a horizontal line in the middle of your vertical axis, These two lines will separate your plot area into four quadrants.

A career option with highest usage of strengths and highest usage of interests should appear in the top right corner. The options with low usage of strengths and high barriers and low usage of your interests would appear in the bottom left corner.

You can download the resource here:

Example:

Thabitha

Thabitha is good and maths and physics practical assessments but struggles with exams, she likes practical hands on tasks like doing electronics experiments at school. She likes quiet environments working on her own and communicating 1:1 to small number of people. She really struggles communicating on the phone and talking to a lot of people whom she doesn’t’ know. She wants something practical where she could work on her own dealing with small number of colleagues.

She shortlisted the following options: going to university to study engineering, doing an apprenticeship in electronics engineering, IT helpdesk, web development, working as sales assistant in the electronics shop.

Thabitha ranked her options based on her strengths and barriers as follows:

1. Apprenticeship in electronics engineering is the best as it is both practical, used her strengths in Maths and Physics and does not require exams.
2. Web development – it is not practical enough and requires some calls to find customers
3. University – it uses her interests, but requires exams and is a busy environment
4. IT help desk – it is not what Thabitha calls practical, not manual and requires to answer calls from customers and this is really not desired.
5. Working in an electronics shop, as it requires dealing with a lot of people and unpredictable interactions.

She ranked based on her interests as follows

1. Apprenticeship in electronics
2. University
3. Web development
4. Electronics shop
5. IT helpdesk

Tabitha plotted her shortlisted options on the graph as follows. The apprenticeship is her best option that she will try to pursue as it uses most of her aspirations, interests and strengths. IT help desk is really not suited for her as it is an environment that doesn’t use her interests where she is not in  control of her schedule and communications and can do electronics related tasks.

Don’t worry if you are unsure about separating some of the options. At this stage I is important to identify the most obvious unsuitable options for you.

My opportunities

Your areas of opportunity is the common area between your motivation, interests, strengths, experience, where there are more factors suited to your strengths and fewer barriers – these are potentially really god options for you.

The careers and industries, the roles that most suited to you will be in the top right corner, in the area of high motivation and high strengths levels.

Please write down your opportunity areas in the All about Me profile.

Skills and experience gaps

Now that you have identified some suitable roles, careers and industries you need to evaluate your current position.

Experience and qualifications.

Let’s consider your current experience and qualifications. It is quite possible that to pursue the more suitable for you career options you would need some specific experiences and qualifications, which you might not have now.

You could consider intermediate steps to gain those experience and / or qualifications.

There are a number of websites that can help you to see what jobs you could be doing with the strengths, skills and qualifications you already have.

www.nationalcareerservice.direct.gov.uk

www.prospects.ac.uk

www.ucas.com

Do you have the pre-requisite experience, skills and qualifications?

Consider your qualifications. What are the entry requirements for your desired career?

If you don’t have any suitable qualifications consider revising your target role to a lower entry point or enrolling in further education.

Now consider your experience. Do you have an experience in the same industry or in similar role?

If yes, you are in a strong position.

If not, volunteering and part time work are good ways of gaining some initial experience.

We will talk about routes into employment in our next lesson.