Deciding what to do with the rest of your life can be a daunting decision. For individuals with autism, that can be even more challenging. If you work closely with a child who has autism – either as a parent or an educator – you might be wondering whether “two skills are better than one” when it comes to career planning.
What does this mean?
Many of us wonder whether it’s best to have one sharply honed skill or a variety of skills that we can call upon in our search for a successful, lucrative career. It’s the classic depth vs. breadth argument. Do we specialize in one area and focus only on that specialty, or do we explore multiple pathways in more of a “generalist” approach?
For individuals on the autism spectrum, the answer is exactly the same as it is for others – and that answer is, “well…it depends.”
Here’s the low-down.
The Transition to Adulthood: Getting to Know Your Student
Before you can start focusing on certain skills, it’s important that you become quite familiar with the student with whom you are working. Each student has his or her own strengths, weaknesses, and passions.
While checklists and how-to guides might be useful on paper, they aren’t going to do much when it comes to working with a student in an up-close-and-personal way.
You need to take the time to invest in that student and truly understand what makes him or her tick. What kind of interests do they have? What goals do they have for the future?
Only after you’ve successfully answered these questions will you be able to provide career advice on whether pursuing just one particular skill is best.
It’s also important that this process starts early and continues often. You should start discussing a student’s plans for the transition out of high school into a career as soon as possible. Don’t wait until the senior year to start planning!
Get as many people involved in this process, too. If you’re a teacher, involve the parents – and vice versa. The career planning process can be overwhelming for anybody, especially a student with autism, so it’s important to get as many people on board to help as possible. You can find some other helpful tips for career planning for students with autism here.
Two Skills Are Better Than One in the Context of ASD
When you start exploring the job market, you’ll quickly realize that you can loosely divide careers and people into two categories – generalists and specialists. If you’re just beginning your career – or working with somebody who is at this critical juncture – you might be wondering which pathway is best.
The short answer is that neither is best, and when you really look at a given job, very few actually require only one skill, to begin with. In fact, most jobs require people to be “jacks of all trades” to some extent.
Let’s break it down a bit more.
If you are a generalist, that means you have an understanding of a wide range of things. You have a decent understanding of business, but you are also good at repairing computers. As a specialist, however, you are going to have a very specific chunk of knowledge that fits well within a clearly defined role.
You do one thing, and you do it very well.
While a specialist may have trained exclusively for his job and be the best person in the world for that job, the reality is that very few careers require just one single skill.
The exception is if you are seeking employment in a relatively uncommon area. For example, if you want to be a baseball player, that might be considered a specialized skill.
The crux of the problem lies in the fact that very few jobs have such a narrow pathway. To be a professional baseball player, you need to be really, really good at one thing – playing baseball. If you are good enough to make it to the professional level, you can probably rely on that skill alone to get you by. You are a successful specialist!
But let’s explore some other options.
Wouldn’t you be better at your job if you also had some skills in business? Perhaps you could then negotiate your own contracts and hold your own in meetings with agents and other stakeholders.
What if you were a great public speaker? You could extend your platform to include speaking events – another way to make money, even after your career as a baseball player has ended due to age or injury.
Long story short, generalists almost always have the upper hand. Being a generalist means you can approach problems from multiple perspectives and use a variety of skills to potentially solve those problems, as this article’s research indicates.
Having two skills – or preferably, even more than two skills – is always better than just having one.
Why Specialization Isn’t Key for Kids with Autism
…or anyone, for that matter.
The problem with being a specialist is that you can only be successful if you are really, really good at what you do. Many kids with autism have specialized interests that they tend to gravitate toward. For example, one student may be incredibly passionate about computers while another may focus his attention on wildlife biology.
Because those passions and interests tend to be much more pronounced in individuals with autism, people who fall into this group generally are very good at what they do. However, for very competitive areas, it often isn’t enough to be very good – you need to be in the top 1%.
What if, instead of being specialized solely in wildlife biology, you had some other skills to add to your roster? That way, you could diversify your skills enough to fit into a wide array of careers.
Encouraging Cognitive Flexibility
To help individuals with autism succeed, it’s important to encourage cognitive flexibility. Many individuals with autism have the unique ability to stay focused and diligent – and to absorb highly specialized information.
They can study a specific topic with persistence and unrivaled determination. For a student interested in wildlife biology, for example, that determination might translate to the memorization of facts about hundreds of different types of animals.
That’s a valuable skill.
However, it’s also important to emphasize to students with autism that a successful career is built upon multiple skills. As a wildlife biologist, you need to understand the behavior and anatomy of various wildlife species – yes, that’s true. Knowing those facts and figures is essential.
However, you also need to understand how to write up reports that will help manage those wildlife species. You need to be able to speak to others to convey your ideas and wildlife plans. You need to be able to conduct scientific studies.
Teaching students with autism to invest in themselves by learning multiple skills is a great way to set those students up for success. To do that, you need to encourage cognitive flexibility. This will help your student with autism think about their career in a larger context and be able to shift gears when one approach isn’t working – or when new knowledge or skills are presented or needed.
To do this, sit down with your student and come up with a plan for how they will get to their desired career.
What skills are needed? What subsets of skills may also be required? Come up with a plan that will help them address what they need to do – and how to shift their thinking without feeling anxious or overwhelmed, if necessary.
Consider the “Big Picture”
For people with autism, it can be a hefty task to look at the big picture rather than the individual details. However, it’s necessary.
Being a specialist only works if you are extremely good at what you do – if you are truly within that 1%.
But being a generalist is underrated. There are certain skills that can help you be successful in just about any endeavor. Those skills are writing, negotiation, and public speaking – you can learn more about why in the video below.
When you have these easy “add-on” skills, they will augment your “main” skill (i.e., wildlife biology) so that you can be successful in any context. This will boost your career flexibility and make you virtually failure-proof. This study proves that generalists are better at predicting the outcome of issues – and adapting to those issues – even when those issues are outside of their areas of expertise.
Another way to encourage the success of kids with autism as they pursue their adult careers is to promote positive self-reflection and good relationship-building. Then, they can take the skills they learned and the relationships they built to foster new growth and new opportunities – no matter what the context might be.
Encourage your child with autism to be a good self-advocate and to constantly pursue new knowledge – and not just knowledge that is exclusively in one area. Constant self-improvement and reflection are the best shortcuts, if there ever were any, to career success. Teach your child that two skills are better than one – and there will be no such thing as failure.
Further Reading:
- Teodoridis et al: When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa
- Meghan Casserly: The Secret Power of the Generalist – and How They’ll Rule the Future
- National Career Development Association: Career Transition Planning for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Tips for High School Counselors
- Anthony et al: Interests in high-functioning autism are more intense, interfering, and idiosyncratic, but not more circumscribed, than those in neurotypical development