AR and video game interviews for future employees with autism
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 10:00 am
Augmented reality, virtual reality and video games are helping people with autism succeed at work, while creating more equitable and neurodiverse organizations.
By Marty Graham , Contributor
When neuroscientist and video game expert Leanne Chukoskie learned that her nephew, now a high school senior, had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, she decided to learn everything she could about the condition and how she could help him thrive. So she dove into the relevant literature, studies, medical jargon and organizations.
What Chukoskie learned about young adults with autism stunned her: While many how to save australia number in whatsapp to college after graduating from higher education, more than 80 percent remain unemployed or underemployed.
“There is so much talent here and it’s all in-house, it’s a huge loss to the outside world,” Chukoskie says. “These are exactly the employees you want: highly intelligent and able to concentrate intensely on tasks with creative solutions, but also loyal and reliable – and they stay on the job for a long time.”
But how to overcome the difficulties of the hiring process and ensure that employees with the disorder feel comfortable in the workplace has proven challenging. While such prominent companies as Microsoft and Dell Technologies have developed their own hiring processes, partnering with autism advocacy groups like the NonPareil Institute on job readiness programs, for example, not all employees with autism have been appropriately recruited and screened.
Chukoskie and a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Power of Neurogaming (PoNG) Center are leveraging augmented reality and video games to prepare autistic people for success in tech jobs. In January, they won a $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue this effort.
Chukoskie’s team is working each year for the next four years with 25 recent autistic high school graduates , including some who are attending community college, to build tools for future cohorts and individuals. The graduates — whom Chukoskie considers student interns — work in groups of five alongside a team of coaches and coders, with the toolkit the team is developing and testing. The course aims to introduce student interns to workplace behavior and procedures, while also teaching play techniques and skills.
Part of that training is done through augmented reality and video games developed by Chukoskie and the PoNG team. They use the sessions to hone a virtual reality tool that simulates the social aspects of work situations to train interns and help them avoid social misalignments. Interns also design and develop their own projects and games, and prepare a presentation for the group at the end of the internship.
“We have turned training into something fun where people can see themselves progress.”
-Leanne Chukoskie, neuroscientist, educator, science communicator
The interns are trained in a game in which, for example, if they look away from the spaceship they control with their gaze, the spaceship explodes. People with autism often struggle to maintain eye contact with their coworkers, and Chukoskie's previous research developing and using this type of gaze-directed game has proven to be a powerful tool.
Social cues can also be a challenge for people with autism.
“We created a set of video games to train, thinking it would help with social cues because those cues are very dynamic, they happen quickly and you can just miss them,” she says. “Our brain’s attention circuit is tied to the eye gaze circuit, so we decided to design eye gaze-based games. We’ve turned training into something fun where people can watch themselves progress.”
Chukoskie has already had success with the people she worked with on a previous fellowship, which helped create an onboarding process that felt more like an internship than a traditional interview.
The Alt Interview
While Chukoskie’s team, like those at a growing number of universities, trains autistic candidates, tech and engineering companies have also been developing their own hiring practices. Danielle Biddick , who worked for a developmental disabilities nonprofit that supported Microsoft’s autism hiring program, was hired by Dell Technologies to develop and improve its neurodiversity hiring.
“The interview process seems completely different from traditional job interviews,” Biddick says. “Some people with autism don’t make it past the first interview, often because they don’t make eye contact or show the enthusiasm an interviewer would expect from them.”
You may also be interested in: Meet some of our Neurodiversity team members
Instead, the in-person interview is replaced by a two-week process, allowing managers and the hiring team to get to know candidates better and let their skills shine. “We don’t have actual interviews. We have them do a technical project where they work with people and get to know them a little bit in an alternative interview process,” Biddick says.
For example, the potential hire may participate in a team project.
Although Dell's projects are confidential, Chukoskie's group has built Lego robots and given interns logic and programming problems to solve, asking them to explain the work they've done in a detailed presentation. In the meantime, they'll work on these projects alongside the hiring team who offer constant feedback and encouragement. There are frequent breaks and plenty of questions asked and answered along the way.
After the project is over, managers and hiring staff decide whether there is a place for the person at the company. While some end up in programming and technical jobs, companies also place people where they can fit in, including in data analytics, cybersecurity, IT auditing, compliance and supply chain management.
The managers
Most of the managers Biddick has worked with were already interested in increasing neurodiversity in their teams.
“Managers tell me that working with someone with autism spectrum disorder has helped them become better managers, better listeners, and made them approach people and projects more thoughtfully,” she says. “They’ve told me that the person may communicate a little differently, but that their technical strengths shine through. I’ve heard them say things like, ‘I gave him a tool that takes months to learn and he figured it out in two weeks. ’”
«Managers tell me that working with someone who has this disorder helped them become better managers, better listeners, and made them approach people and projects with greater thoughtfulness.»
-Danielle Biddick, Neurodiversity Recruitment, Dell Technologies
When hiring someone with autism, Biddick connects managers to formal training from community partners on what autism is and isn't. She says a clearer understanding can demystify stereotypes and make it easier to relate to the new employee.
Each new employee is assigned a mentor and a job coach who provides support to the individual joining the team and to the managers.
“The challenges are easy to train and we have job coaches/trainers who support both the employee and the manager,” he says. “We can provide noise-cancelling headphones if people are distracted by hearing.”
For example, employees can attend meetings by phone if they feel anxious or overwhelmed in large meetings or over video conferences. The job coach/advisor can also support managers dealing with potential difficulties some autistic people may have, for example, in planning and executing projects and in managing time effectively.
New hires
People with autism often struggle with the unspoken “rules” in a corporate environment – that work relationships are not the same as friendships or that the boss is treated differently than coworkers. Biddick coaches them on how to ask for help in an appropriate way, how to ask for feedback from a manager, and how to show that you are working on this feedback. “It’s more of a life training than a job training,” she says.
Those unspoken rules are something Chukoskie and his team are working on as they train program participants for technical jobs. Because they are often getting their first corporate job, the way to behave in such a workplace can be completely new.
“People don’t have models for different types of relationships if they haven’t been in the workplace,” Chukoskie says. “We had one intern who became our disruptor because he was so excited to have so many people to meet and befriend. We used the internship to work on some of the soft skills.”
Chukoskie says there is no set of best practices, although he is often asked about them.
“There’s nothing magical about this,” she says. “Meet people where they are. We all want to be in a more equitable workplace.”
By Marty Graham , Contributor
When neuroscientist and video game expert Leanne Chukoskie learned that her nephew, now a high school senior, had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, she decided to learn everything she could about the condition and how she could help him thrive. So she dove into the relevant literature, studies, medical jargon and organizations.
What Chukoskie learned about young adults with autism stunned her: While many how to save australia number in whatsapp to college after graduating from higher education, more than 80 percent remain unemployed or underemployed.
“There is so much talent here and it’s all in-house, it’s a huge loss to the outside world,” Chukoskie says. “These are exactly the employees you want: highly intelligent and able to concentrate intensely on tasks with creative solutions, but also loyal and reliable – and they stay on the job for a long time.”
But how to overcome the difficulties of the hiring process and ensure that employees with the disorder feel comfortable in the workplace has proven challenging. While such prominent companies as Microsoft and Dell Technologies have developed their own hiring processes, partnering with autism advocacy groups like the NonPareil Institute on job readiness programs, for example, not all employees with autism have been appropriately recruited and screened.
Chukoskie and a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Power of Neurogaming (PoNG) Center are leveraging augmented reality and video games to prepare autistic people for success in tech jobs. In January, they won a $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue this effort.
Chukoskie’s team is working each year for the next four years with 25 recent autistic high school graduates , including some who are attending community college, to build tools for future cohorts and individuals. The graduates — whom Chukoskie considers student interns — work in groups of five alongside a team of coaches and coders, with the toolkit the team is developing and testing. The course aims to introduce student interns to workplace behavior and procedures, while also teaching play techniques and skills.
Part of that training is done through augmented reality and video games developed by Chukoskie and the PoNG team. They use the sessions to hone a virtual reality tool that simulates the social aspects of work situations to train interns and help them avoid social misalignments. Interns also design and develop their own projects and games, and prepare a presentation for the group at the end of the internship.
“We have turned training into something fun where people can see themselves progress.”
-Leanne Chukoskie, neuroscientist, educator, science communicator
The interns are trained in a game in which, for example, if they look away from the spaceship they control with their gaze, the spaceship explodes. People with autism often struggle to maintain eye contact with their coworkers, and Chukoskie's previous research developing and using this type of gaze-directed game has proven to be a powerful tool.
Social cues can also be a challenge for people with autism.
“We created a set of video games to train, thinking it would help with social cues because those cues are very dynamic, they happen quickly and you can just miss them,” she says. “Our brain’s attention circuit is tied to the eye gaze circuit, so we decided to design eye gaze-based games. We’ve turned training into something fun where people can watch themselves progress.”
Chukoskie has already had success with the people she worked with on a previous fellowship, which helped create an onboarding process that felt more like an internship than a traditional interview.
The Alt Interview
While Chukoskie’s team, like those at a growing number of universities, trains autistic candidates, tech and engineering companies have also been developing their own hiring practices. Danielle Biddick , who worked for a developmental disabilities nonprofit that supported Microsoft’s autism hiring program, was hired by Dell Technologies to develop and improve its neurodiversity hiring.
“The interview process seems completely different from traditional job interviews,” Biddick says. “Some people with autism don’t make it past the first interview, often because they don’t make eye contact or show the enthusiasm an interviewer would expect from them.”
You may also be interested in: Meet some of our Neurodiversity team members
Instead, the in-person interview is replaced by a two-week process, allowing managers and the hiring team to get to know candidates better and let their skills shine. “We don’t have actual interviews. We have them do a technical project where they work with people and get to know them a little bit in an alternative interview process,” Biddick says.
For example, the potential hire may participate in a team project.
Although Dell's projects are confidential, Chukoskie's group has built Lego robots and given interns logic and programming problems to solve, asking them to explain the work they've done in a detailed presentation. In the meantime, they'll work on these projects alongside the hiring team who offer constant feedback and encouragement. There are frequent breaks and plenty of questions asked and answered along the way.
After the project is over, managers and hiring staff decide whether there is a place for the person at the company. While some end up in programming and technical jobs, companies also place people where they can fit in, including in data analytics, cybersecurity, IT auditing, compliance and supply chain management.
The managers
Most of the managers Biddick has worked with were already interested in increasing neurodiversity in their teams.
“Managers tell me that working with someone with autism spectrum disorder has helped them become better managers, better listeners, and made them approach people and projects more thoughtfully,” she says. “They’ve told me that the person may communicate a little differently, but that their technical strengths shine through. I’ve heard them say things like, ‘I gave him a tool that takes months to learn and he figured it out in two weeks. ’”
«Managers tell me that working with someone who has this disorder helped them become better managers, better listeners, and made them approach people and projects with greater thoughtfulness.»
-Danielle Biddick, Neurodiversity Recruitment, Dell Technologies
When hiring someone with autism, Biddick connects managers to formal training from community partners on what autism is and isn't. She says a clearer understanding can demystify stereotypes and make it easier to relate to the new employee.
Each new employee is assigned a mentor and a job coach who provides support to the individual joining the team and to the managers.
“The challenges are easy to train and we have job coaches/trainers who support both the employee and the manager,” he says. “We can provide noise-cancelling headphones if people are distracted by hearing.”
For example, employees can attend meetings by phone if they feel anxious or overwhelmed in large meetings or over video conferences. The job coach/advisor can also support managers dealing with potential difficulties some autistic people may have, for example, in planning and executing projects and in managing time effectively.
New hires
People with autism often struggle with the unspoken “rules” in a corporate environment – that work relationships are not the same as friendships or that the boss is treated differently than coworkers. Biddick coaches them on how to ask for help in an appropriate way, how to ask for feedback from a manager, and how to show that you are working on this feedback. “It’s more of a life training than a job training,” she says.
Those unspoken rules are something Chukoskie and his team are working on as they train program participants for technical jobs. Because they are often getting their first corporate job, the way to behave in such a workplace can be completely new.
“People don’t have models for different types of relationships if they haven’t been in the workplace,” Chukoskie says. “We had one intern who became our disruptor because he was so excited to have so many people to meet and befriend. We used the internship to work on some of the soft skills.”
Chukoskie says there is no set of best practices, although he is often asked about them.
“There’s nothing magical about this,” she says. “Meet people where they are. We all want to be in a more equitable workplace.”