People with autism have natural abilities that make them better at jobs requiring attention to detail, repetition, and sequencing, explains Meticulon Consulting CEO Garth Johnson.
Announced today, Meticulon is a new social enterprise started up in Calgary to offer high-tech services provided by people with autism, leveraging their meticulous technical and computer skills. It was created in July and fashioned after successful ventures in Europe.
Meticulon is a project of Autism Calgary Association in partnership with the federal government and the Sinneave Family Foundation, a recognized partner across North America in programming and research that improves the quality of life for those living with autism.
The company taps into the extraordinary talents of adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder to provide superior technical services – software testing, quality assurance, digitization, scanning, and data verification – to client companies, and seeks to directly employ 44 people and place over 100 others elsewhere within 4 years.
Meticulon aspires to start at least 2 branch locations in Canada and help stimulate the creation of 250 more jobs in other industries for people with autism. It is founding a free community-based resource website for information exchange, cooperative learning, and mentoring.
Over 85 percent of adults with autism are unemployed, yet many of them are vastly superior to neurotypical adults in certain areas such as excelling at detailed computer tasks, detecting errors, and performing mathematical functions.
There are over 400,000 adults in Canada with autism, including those with valuable technical skills and talents, yet many of them have long been overlooked and under-served in the job market. Many are often written off.
Using intensive assessment methods developed in Belgium, Meticulon identifies its employees’ (Meticulon consultants’) key strengths and areas needing improvement, and provides customized job coaching, helping them to overcome workplace challenges.
“We don’t impart skills or abilities to our people – they have that in abundance. All we have to do is match them to the right job and help them to unlock their inborn gifts and talents,” said Johnson in a news release.
“We’re here to help people, but it also has to make sense to our customers,” he added. “Although many customers come to us with the motive of doing some social good, they will retain our services because of the excellent work product we provide.”