SME Spotlight: Social entrepreneurs filling the skills gap

ASPIEDENT is a startup social enterprise aiming to improve the employment situation for autistic people.

It has been one of the 80 businesses involved in the Entrepreneurial Spark (a project delivered by NatWest and KPMG) scheme in Leeds. It was founded in 2014 by Dr Elizabeth Guest, who has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, can speak French, German and Dutch, and was herself was diagnosed with autism in 2005.

Formerly a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University in computing, Dr Guest left in 2014 to set up Aspiedent, which also provides consultancy services to employers who would like to be trained to work effectively with people with autism.

So far it has worked with North Lincolnshire Council and Yorkshire Water and is looking at more employers in the Leeds City Region.

Founder Dr Guest spoke to TheBusinessDesk.com.

Tell us about Aspedient – why do you think we need an organisation like it?

It had become clear by the time I left Leeds Beckett (formerly Leeds Metropolitan University) that no impartial services to help employers with autistic employees existed. The only services that attempted to do this were those who provided support and thus cannot be impartial.

Since then it has become clear that there are no appropriate services for autistic people with degrees who are struggling to find employment. Aspiedent aims to fill this niche.

Why are employers not considering people with autism for jobs?

I think there are several reasons
1) Fear – virtually everything on autism focuses on challenging behaviour. Most employers think that by taking on someone with autism, they are generating problems for themselves.

2) Many autistic people struggle to get through standardised recruitment processes. We have been told many times that an employer does not discriminate against autistic people only to have a recruitment process described that does just that.

3) Autistic people tend to have poor social skills. They may find it extremely uncomfortable to make eye contact. They often misunderstand questions or answer a question in too much detail. This does not make for a promising interview environment. Given two similarly qualified people, the non autistic person will usually succeed at interview. (There are of course cases where an autistic person is good at interview but then cannot hand the job for some reason – autism varies a lot between people.)

4) Autistic people tend to be extremely honest. This can be a major problem.

What can employers do to make a comfortable working environment for people with autism?

Understanding and acceptance are vital. It is impossible to make an autistic person behave “normally” all the time. They are quirky, and may be difficult to get to know. They often cause offense by their honesty and may not understand how what they said or did was offensive. This needs to be accepted.

Many people with autism have sensory issues, which make certain working environments problematic. The move to open plan offices can be a real problem for many (as well as some non-autistic people).

It is possible to design open plan offices so they are suitable for everyone, but this actually takes up just as much or more space than reasonably sized individual offices.

Because autistic people tend to be so honest and not very good at social interaction, the standard managerial techniques tend to make any issues worse. It is vital that managers and staff have good quality training, which we can provide.

We also provide social skills training for autistic employees to help them better understand how autism affects them and how the rest of the world works.
It is important that employer and employee together strive to meet part way.

Are there any government initiatives to help out in this area?

The government currently has an initiative to halve the disability employment gap. But with recent changes who knows if it will continue.

Access to Work is a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) scheme which is designed to fund the extra expense of employing somebody with a disability. 

It used to be a good service but after changes, presumably to cut costs to make it more efficient, it is now an absolute nightmare. We have had two major and prolonged fights and have spent a lot of time helping employers to deal with them.