Join Across the Desk for our new series in partnership with MentorAbility Ontario. A national initiative that promotes the employment of people who have a disability in communities throughout Canada. MentorAbility is spearheaded by local Coordinators who facilitate a full or half day mentoring experience in which job seekers who have a disability are matched with individual mentors (employers) – to explore career opportunities and learn what they need to get ahead in their desired field of interest.

We're welcoming Vanessa Tomas back to further discuss the employment aspect of the National Autism Strategy.

Executive function - sounds like something you get cured of when working in a big company right? Turns out it affects a lot of different aspects of our lives and probably way more than we realize. Join us to learn about the five core skills of executive function, what can happen when these skills need some support in development and how you can work on them. Does everybody with autism have an executive function deficit? Well ... does everyone in the world have blue eyes???? Anyone can have an executive function challenge but not everyone does ;)

CASDA is working hard to create a strong a National Autism Strategy to create opportunities for all autistic Canadians. Today's conversation is with Stephanie Cote and Vanessa Tomas. Two members of the CASDA team working on the National Strategy. Their focus is on employment with two projects: the Autism Employment Scan and the Autistic Voices Project.

Visit: https://www.casda.ca/resources/ to learn more!

Join us to learn about what CASDA's been up to in 2020 and get involved in the conversation about the National Autism Strategy!

We're diving in to alone vs lonely today. Why? Because there is a HUGE misconception for both of these words when it comes to the autism community. There's the perception that autistic people don't want relationships and prefer to be alone. Wrong! There's also the perception that people who prefer to spend time with themselves are lonely. Also wrong! Let's find out more shall we?

Asking for help needs to be thought about differently. So many people refuse to ask for help because of ego. More can't ask for help because of anxiety. Some just don't know how. We need to fix this. Asking for help needs to be seen as a strength. Asking for help shouldn't induce anxiety but give a sense of relief. Asking for help doesn't require a plan, just an ask. The ask of, "help me figure out what my ask is". Let's just start there :)

We're back with another discovery tool to help autistic individuals build a stronger plan for employment success. How can the Career Personality Profiler help? It focuses on strengths and how to tie that in to employment options. It gives you ideas for careers you might not have considered. It taps in to the areas you might need to work on in order to be successful at any job. It also gives you ideas about what you shouldn't do as a career ;) We're using it to help autistic clients and invite you to take a look to see if it would work for you!

The autism community has had little access to discovery tools which align their mental state and employment goals. We're trying to fix that. With a lot of research, we're using the Enneagram tool to help an autistic individual learn more about their strengths, how they might react under stress in the workplace and plan their job search strategy accordingly. Interested? Good! We are too ;)

What is the right level of support for someone with autism to reach their full potential? What is the difference between medical language and accepting / empowering language? We need to fix the way people think about the folks in the autism community as having deficits vs being differently abled and being amazing, different, fantastic folks. Let's reframe the stereotype.