The real reason why Aspies are often unemployable.

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Aspies are unemployable because they're disabled; they frequently can't deal with stress or have the social skills necessary to survive.

I think I was declared unemployable because of my anxiety and lack of social skills. My sensory issues may have played a part as well.

I simply have too many difficulties to accommodate, and without a degree I firmly believe I have no hope of ever finding full-time employment.

Employers are never likely to hire someone who exhibits the following:

- Poor at making and maintaining eye contact.
- An abysmal attention span due to sound sensitivities and possibly undiagnosed ADD.
- Misunderstanding abstract language.
- Terrible reading comprehension.
- A working memory that makes Homer Simpson look like Einstein.
- Inability to multi-task.
- Communication difficulties, which continue to regress with each passing year. I never know what to say to other people and inevitably awkward silences are frequent when I am around.


I honestly believe that I am too dumb to survive in this world.

Well...I mean the factors people are mentioning here do often lead to un/underemployment, especially if the disability is severe, but not always. Yes, if people want you to show up regularly and interact with others, you need to be able to do that well. It's not trivial, it's because people have to be able to communicate well and get along well in teams to get their work done efficiently. If every little thing has to be spelled out, and people are pissing each other off, the projects bog down.

Literalness and inattention to norms are problems, too. I knew a guy once who almost had a breakdown trying to paint a room. That was the job: paint this room. Put the paint, which is right here, on the walls of this room, which you are standing in, using those brushes, which are on the floor in front of you. But he wanted to know to the millimetre where the paint was supposed to go, how thick, in what direction, etc., etc., etc. He didn't understand that it really wasn't that complicated. And actually I'm sure that if he hadn't had explicit instructions he'd have screwed it up somehow, painted the ceiling or something too. He didn't look at the job and think "what do most people mean by this" and have an answer come to mind. He had problems with an envelope-stuffing job, too: got all caught up in variables nobody cared about, or would have had to explain to others, and then got so frustrated he started yelling when he couldn't get the instructions he wanted. Got fired and escorted out of the building. He didn't have a lot of friends, either. Basically he had one friend and then a lot of acquaintances he called friends, even after he hadn't seen or talked to them for years.

On the other hand, he had vast and very well-articulated knowledge, and a degree, in a pretty arcane field: library cataloguing. Eventually he found professional work as a cataloguer in a forgiving environment where someone already knew him. It didn't matter that he didn't dress well or flapped his hands or was often fatigued. Cataloguers don't deal much with the public, mostly they're just dealing with the materials. The job was hard to come by, because there aren't a lot of library jobs, but he was able to get by once he got the job. It probably helped that he was able to seem social and make eye contact (if brief and weirdly intense eye contact) for short spans, so he made a decent first impression. A lot of it just had to do with applying and applying and applying and not getting discouraged even when the interviews went horribly.

Keeping the job often comes down to the boss and remembering that you really do have to show up and do the job (without complaining about it or making rude remarks). If you have a boss who understands the scope of your abilities and what you're good at, and has a use for those things, then as long as you don't get creative and start making changes unilaterally (which will probably just make more work for your boss), you'll probably be fine.

I've got quite a few difficulties that I feel make me unemployable in today's society where social skills are valued far more than the actual skills required to do the job well.

1. Executive function difficulties
2. Anxiety issues
3. Trouble multitasking
4. Communication difficulties
5. Mediocre attention span
6. Not very good conversation and social skills

I've only gotten two interviews in the last eight years, and didn't get either job.

It's not just Aspies or people with Autism.

Many countries, especially the U.S. are very very hostile to hiring anyone they perceive as having something wrong.
Management will always hire the people that best reflect them.

People don't like to hire, work, or be around people that are different from them.

Here's my employment story:
No longer surprisingly, my college education did not prepare me for a career. One big reason is because I was overwhelmed trying to pick one. I have very few interests. With a keen interest in music theory, I settled on a non-performing, non-teaching job in the music field.
I attended a 2-year community college that advertised it could help you get music-related employment. But it specialized in performing jazz musicianship. So I got little out of it. I then finished up, transferring my 2-year credits to a local 4-year college. I settled on the most basic degree. Not a bachelor of fine arts in music or music education, just a bachelor of arts.
Then I wandered out into the working world. I could only get menial jobs. One coworker said "You graduated college? What are you doing here?".
Two years after leaving college, I got very lucky. Twice, during those two years, I visited a local mom-and-pop operation that printed sheet music. I'll call them MT. They had an opening in January of 1981. It also just so happened that the boss' daughter was in my high school graduating class. I easily got the "music typist" job.
I continued to be appreciated when MT was sold to the music publishing company BM but MT was still an entity.
Then MT was sold to CPP and moved from NY to Florida. MT was no more. I relocated. Under CPP I was not recognized. I was just a cog in a wheel. This corporate fish-eat-fish process continued for two decades. We were sold and re-sold and re-sold. There was a golden age for me in this corporate world from 1989 thru 1997. My manager and the CEO appreciated me and I got some achievement awards. But then my manager and CEO moved on, and once again I felt like a nobody.
In 2000, my job morphed from inputting music notation to cleaning up pre-input notation, and only occasionally inputting. So my job was mainly cleaning up a lot of minutiae that few, if any, musicians care about. Very few people outside the music engraving (typesetting) department had a clue what my job was.
Though initially, I was very excited to do exactly what I endeavored, once I was in the mega-corporate world, I was in a dead-end. I remained a worker-ant. I never got a promotion. Still, I felt trapped in my job. I had nowhere else to go.
In 2012, the bubble deflated. Our products weren't selling. I lost my job. I felt like I was shipwrecked, on a raft in the middle of the Pacific, with no help in sight. I despaired at the thought of having to pick another career at 55. I shot about aimlessly, applying for jobs I neither wanted nor qualified for. Resumé and interview workshops did not help.
I finally sought and got some help from Vocational Rehabilitation. They agreed with my intuition that it would not make sense for me to go back to school and train for some other occupation I wasn't interested in. They referred me to a local, well-known psychologist who made a very strong case for my getting SS disability. My case was soon accepted, and I retired on disability.
Are there any questions out there?
Stephen

The only jobs I have ever had -- other than working in food service as a teenager and in the campus library in college -- came from knowing people. That has always seemed so strange to me. These neurotypical weirdos are much more interested in hiring someone they already know or someone a friend or family member of them knows than hiring someone they might not know who would make them more money or get better results. Blows my mind.

I have missed out on a lot of opportunities because the interviewer or interviewing team seemed more interested in whether I'd be someone fun to have a beer with rather than what skills I had and results I could produce. I am much better at what I do that probably 99% of people out there, but because I don't do small talk well, I miss out on a lot of good jobs.

I made an account to talk about work-related frustrations and see if I could get some advice. Looks like socializing is all that matters. I'm an unemployed electrical engineer; got frustrated from not getting a job (plus student loans) and joined the Army. BIG MISTAKE. It's like high school, except people have more power over you and constantly remind you how you're different and why that's wrong. Honestly starting to wonder why I even bother living anymore.

But yeah, OP mirrors my experience.

Just a thought, but anyone ever thought about driving trucks? Or is that social too?

I struggle with the social aspects of a job and the whole process of finding a job. I'm very hit-and-miss with recruiters as well.

Once I get my foot in the door, I manage to stay because my boss can see everything I'm capable of.

And then the boss leaves either because they found a better job or there's "restructuring".

And then I eventually end up leaving because the new boss takes me for granted and I get burnt out and can't take it anymore and don't have the skills to "fit in" with the new regime or negotiate a solution (I'm easily discouraged).

And then the department I used to work in undergoes even more restructuring after I've left.

This has happened to me THREE times already. I held the last job for eight years. (I've been unemployed for the last 10 months.) As I've been looking at job listings lately for the word I used to do (or had hoped to do), I'm finding myself mightily discouraged because so many of them require being social and up-to-date on social media (which I find rather intrusive). It's like it isn't enough to just show up at work and do the work; I have to market my personality as well. I'm at the point that I don't know what I want to do or even can do because my confidence is entirely shot at this point.