News and Knowledge

Parents and professionals often contact me looking for help with a young adult with autism who is out of school, looking for work, and ill-prepared to do so. As a parent, I feel their pain. My son, Jeremy, severely impacted by autism, is working towards becoming a happy taxpayer. He isn’t there yet, but he is on the path to reach that goal.

It didn’t happen overnight though. As Jeremy wrote in A Full Life with Autism (the book we co-authored with practical advice about the transition to adult life), “Rome was not built on the first day. I need time to build the Eiffel Tower of my life.”

To be honest, waiting until a young person with autism is out of school to be focusing on looking for work or a possible career path is not something I recommend. The best way to prepare a person for employment is to start teaching him/her needed life skills early on and to focus on strengths. (That being said, better late than never). Truthfully, not everyone is going to fit into a typical job, but those life skills are still needed to live in the community and to develop strengths and interests into other work options such as self-employment.

Teach Life Skills Before the Young Person Leaves School

It is necessary to teach functional life skills while the person is still in school receiving special education services under IDEA for one good reason: After a student ages out of school services or graduates with a high school diploma, he/she may be eligible for adult services but services are not mandated the way special education services are. This means that, if a young person needs to learn skills after school services have ended, there is no guarantee that the funding or program will be there to help him/her learn.

However, while a student is receiving special education services under IDEA, functional life skills can be broken down and translated into IEP goals and objectives. Obviously, the skill level reached for each life skill will be different depending on the person, but every student needs to learn as much as he/she is able, in order to live and work in the community. The Individual Transition Plan is really a plan for learning what is necessary for real life as an adult. Make the most of it!

As discussed at length in my book, Autism Life Skills, life skills, such as self-regulation, independence, social relationships, and self-advocacy, are important for getting and keeping a job. The topic of earning a living is the last chapter in my book, because being able to get and hold a job is really the culmination of all the life skills hopefully learned during the school-age years, whether a person is on or off the spectrum. For example:

• For a person to be accepted in a workplace, he/she must be able to control emotional and sensory meltdowns.
• A certain amount of independence is needed at most jobs.
• An employee must understand that how he/she should speak to his/her boss or a customer is different from how he/she would speak to a colleague. That is why training in relationship skills is important.
• An employee must have self-advocacy skills in order to ask for whatever is needed to do the job successfully.

Build on Strengths

While your teen or pre-teen is learning life skills, it’s also important to be focusing on his or her strengths. Too often in the educational environment we focus on the deficits we need to “fix” without taking into consideration a student’s strengths. By focusing on your teen’s or pre-teen’s strengths, you may discover potential areas to explore in regard to developing employment skill.

For example, when we were thinking about Jeremy’s future money-making potential while he was in high school, (either in a job, customized or self-employment), we thought about the different strengths and weaknesses he had. Some of the questions we asked ourselves were:

• What is Jeremy usually drawn to?
• Is there a particular subject area or skill area that Jeremy excels in?
• If left to his own devices, what does he like to do most?
• What motivates Jeremy to do what he does?
• How successful is he at self-regulating?
• Does he need to work in a place with low sensory stimulation?
• What kinds of situations cause Jeremy to feel anxious?
• What do his organizational or multitasking skills look like?
• Does Jeremy do better in crowded environments or when there are fewer people around?
• Does he like moving around or staying in the same place?
• How many hours a week of work can Jeremy handle?  Is a 40-hour-a-week job realistic or does he need a part time job?
• Does Jeremy like routine and the stability of doing the same thing every day or does he like change?

Next, we focused on his areas of strength to help him with the skills that were more difficult for him. Although Jeremy has a lot of sensory-motor challenges, we knew he could learn if the steps of a task were broken down and he practiced them.

Three years ago, we discovered Jeremy has a talent that we are now learning to market. Jeremy has synesthesia and sees letters, numbers, words, and people’s emotions as color. He loves to paint. He can paint people’s portraits based on the colors of their emotions, and people are willing to pay for that. So we created a work situation around his talent once we realized there was a market for it.

Since Jeremy really enjoys painting, he is motivated to spend five to six half-days a week at the art studio painting. The rest of his time is spent writing the descriptions of what each color of the painting means for the client, going to the gym, and doing his household chores. Jeremy also enjoys being at the beach, so he volunteers with the lifeguards at a beach in San Diego, helping to set up the cones and flags and other needed equipment for the day. But mostly, he loves painting. You can see some of Jeremy’s artwork and descriptions at Jeremy’s Vision.

Some individuals will be able to fit into the traditional job market and some will not. But to be successful at any money-earning endeavor, basic life skills are needed. Those life skills are also needed for real life as an adult. Knowing what your student’s strengths are can help guide him or her towards employment opportunities that could be a good fit or to develop a self-employment option. It’s never too early to be thinking about the transition to adulthood.

Chantal Sicile-Kira’s passion for empowering others has led her to become an award-winning author of six books, speaker, advocate, and leader in the field of autism, adolescence, and transition to adulthood. Her first experience with autism was teaching functional living skills to young adults at a California state hospital in preparation for deinstitutionalization. This experience proved to be invaluable when her son, Jeremy, was diagnosed many years later. Her two most recent books are A Full Life with Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Visit AutismCollege.com for more information.