MomofThree1975 wrote:
I have seen that there is a wide gaping hole between what is done in school and what is done in the workplace. I feel like I need to prepare my son from now, how to live independent of me and possible function in the work place. That means, he gets to have his "down" time, but he also needs to practice social norms. When we have holiday lunches or dinner at work, I have to dig back into my earlier days of what the proper table manners are. I am very happy that I know what to do, even though I rarely ever use 6 utensils to eat. But thank goodness I learned enough to not look like a cavewoman.
Well, my son needs to know what is appropriate or expected. He can choose when to do it and when not to do it. But when the time comes to go on a job interview, he would have learned to sit in one place, look at the person's face (occasionally the eyes) and answer the questions he is asked.
I can only speak for myself and compare to others. So job interviews are a hard thing for me. It is really hard for me to manage those, because of my lack of social skills. This is my mis advantage: I am a catastrophe in social skills. But once I have a job, normally people want to keep me, because of my technical skills and knowledge. So this is my advantage I can offer.
While many autists that have been trained and trained and trained on social skills, dont can offer technical skills and knowlege, because of them being too exhausted and tired to learn more complicated stuff and doing a good school, beside learning all that social stuff.
The thing is: As a company owner, responsible for giving someone a job: Who would you want for your company?
The one with the just acceptable social skills, that can offer you job skills, that thousend other persons with great social skills, also can offer you? And why would you want to have a secretary with just acceptable social skills, when you can have a dozend others with the same job skills and wonderful social skills?
Or the one with the horrible social skills, that can offer you job skills, that are hard to find?
I only can compare it, because of reading other peoples threads or discussing with them on other forums, but from my oppinion the ones that have only basic job knowledge but have been trained and trained and trained on social skills, until they were acceptable, are the ones not finding a job. Because they compete with lots of other normal NT that can offer companies the same jobskills, but with better social skill and abilities and without all the Asperger problems.
28 Mar 2013, 11:45 pm
