Excellent: Dutch company creates a place for highly skilled workers with autism to succeed

Steen B. Iversen tests mobile phones for the Danish telecommunications firm TDC. Before landing his job two and a half years ago, Iversen, 50, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, spent more than 12 years looking for work. “It’s always been somewhat traumatizing,” he said. “I have had jobs, but I always got fired. People would laugh about me behind my back and laugh at me to my face. Those problems have more or less been a problem for me from childhood.”

In the working world, Iversen said, his biggest problem was communication. “Most of the time it simply was that people didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them,” he said.

Iversen works for a remarkable Danish company, Specialisterne (“The Specialists”), that is improving the futures of many families by opening up job opportunities for people with Asperger’s Syndrome and high-functioning autism who have historically found themselves excluded from employment, largely because they don’t fit in with workplace norms.

Specialisterne was founded by Thorkil Sonne. Eleven years ago, Sonne was a successful executive at TDC when his youngest child, Lars, then 3, was diagnosed with autism. “I had the perfect career and the perfect family,” he recalled. “It was so shocking to realize that one of our family members had a lifelong disability. As parents we wanted to make the best possible future for all of our children, not just the two who were non-disabled. So we had to come up with a new plan for our family’s future.”

More: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/putting-the-gifts-of-the-autistic-to-work/
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