Steve Hill, CCO, Auticon
Tell us about Auticon, who are you and what do you do?
Auticon is a social enterprise, so it's very much a case of our social mission driving everything we do. We've been around for 13 years and operate in 15 countries across Europe, Australia, North America, Canada.
We are mightily ambitious, but we are very much driven by social impact. Our social mission really is focused on two things. The first thing is creating employment opportunities for autistic adults, and the second part is much more broad - creating awareness and education around neurodiversity as a whole.
We work by recruiting and training people with autism to become IT consultants. The people that join our consulting team will have a STEM background, not necessarily degree level but in many cases way beyond degrees into MSCs and even PhDs, and they also have the technical skills. Most of the IT roles we have tend to be data-related.
Why should people care about neurodiversity? What the compelling reasons to invest in it?
In the UK, certainly, and I think it's probably true across all Western countries for adults in employment with autism, the stats are fairly sobering. Only 29 percent of autistic adults are in employment, and that includes the underemployed. We very much focus on really helping those individuals transition from education to the workplace, but also those folks that maybe are in positions incommensurate to their skills and academic experience but aren’t necessarily finding the right levels of support.
By working with us we're taking that conversation away from our client, by having a diagnosed and disclosed individual with autism as part of a team, then fundamentally we are mitigating that fear and risk of the client doing or saying the wrong thing.
So we're not only providing a really formidably talented individual into a particular project, but this is also about starting a much wider conversation around inclusion and giving practical advice and help on the ground.
What are some of the challenges your consultants face?
It will come down to the individual. What might be some of the modest adjustments or accommodations that would make a huge benefit to our consultant? That could be things as simple as camera on, camera off on a teams call, or understanding the construct of the team and their backgrounds. Having a workplace buddy to go to in terms of logging time or expenses.
What are the unwritten rules of the office and that specific environment? Is the job of our consultant to listen only, to question, to challenge, to present? It's these subtle nuances that can be a great source of anxiety. If you attack them head-on and everyone's very clear about their role, it makes a massive difference. And that consequential benefit affects the whole team positively.
What are your plans for the future?
We have a very focused recruitment model and typically we spend a lot of time with certain universities. But we want to go further than providing lots of consultants into lots of businesses.
There's a long way to go and hopefully in a modest way we can become a conduit in sectors that don't require IT or there isn't a requirement for IT consultants for us helping to enable those clients to understand where they might be on their path to neuroinclusion.
It's about supporting individuals, enabling the individuals through training in organisations. At the same time, it's about baking in some of these processes, principles, procedures into the organisation itself, making that long term societal shift.
Fundamentally, what we want to be able to do is to is to be able to create a pathway from education directly into the workplace. We create some support services to make sure that that person is fully supported when they go into the organization, and we can start that conversation around your inclusion as part of that as well.
Eventually, the grand vision is that we won't just be in IT; we will take baby steps into other disciplines. Things like actuarial science are very closely aligned to data science in many ways. Eventually, it might be architecture, media, or the creative arts. It's everything.
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