The topic I'd like to explore is underemployment of people with Aspergers - not in the sense of working fast food or janitorial jobs, but being underemployed in a current professional capacity or setting e.g. office.
I understand this happens quite a lot to people with AS, it has happened to me a couple of times - where we find our workload (or even our hours) are reduced, typically under some pretext that "there isn't enough work to go around" or "things have slowed down lately" - sometimes I found it was true and I got a steady stream of meaningful project work a month after, other times it wasn't - I knew it was BS that there wasn't enough work to go around b/c I saw my less experienced colleagues get higher calibre projects that I was completely capable of.
When it did happen, it was clearly "the writing on the wall" that the higher-ups were dissatisfied with the way I handled things, even if I had several positive contributions and insights - it could have been a series of misinterpreting instructions, or a couple of social gaffes, or subjective preference or whatever - who knows. It was clearly a hint to get me to leave, as it is to others who get the same isolating treatment.
Sometimes, they tell you that they'd like you to be on a "special project" which doesn't seem to have significance; which should be a big red flag from there. Or they give you menial tasks like file clerking or errand boy stuff.
I think the challenge is that when we DO encounter such underemployment, is how to approach the higher-ups with the contradiction between what you've been told and the facts, i.e. John and Mary have been put on high-profile projects but you haven't, and you have expertise in the areas of those projects - or that you've heard from a colleague that some new projects have come in but nobody's been assigned to them yet - of course, that could be really awkward if you're just expected to "read between the lines" without any confrontation or protest. Which could be construed as an "attitude problem" if you bring it up, thus dragging you down further like quicksand.
So what solutions do you think or have you tried in such cases?
27 Oct 2013, 3:28 pm
