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What's your experience of being, or supporting, a neurodiverse engineer?

Michael Hargreaves

With the launch of Foothold's new Engineering Neurodiverse Futures programme, we want to build a world where every aspiring and established engineer has the opportunity to make the most of their unique capabilities, and reach their full potential.

We know that there are a significant number of people in our community who are or believe they may be neurodivergent - living with a condition such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia. In fact, it's estimated that there are around 820,000 neurodiverse engineers working in the industry in the UK alone. Perhaps you're one of them, or you know someone who is?

But sadly, there are many barriers that neurodiverse engineers encounter every day, which may prevent them from taking opportunities that neurotypical people take for granted. 

There can be challenges for neurotypical people too, in knowing how best to support, work and communicate with neurodivergent peers - so that everyone can thrive in their own way.

We've developed our brand-new Differently Wired Hub for the engineering community to help address some of these challenges. But we want to know: what's your experience of being, or supporting, a neurodiverse engineer?

Let's start the neurodiversity in engineering conversation so we can raise awareness of the challenges faced by our community - and recognise, appreciate and celebrate the contributions that every one of our community members makes to the industry, whether neurodivergent or neurotypical!

Share your experiences and stories with us below Point down

You can find out more and join our Differently Wired Hub here.

Parents

  • Hi Michael,

    Ok, now I'm in Relaxed, first comment is that the resources I've looked at all seem to be videos? Please also look at providing the same information in written form - it's a key point of neuro diversity that people have different learning styles / best ways of gathering information. For some, videos are brilliant, for others (me included) they're a complete pain.

    I guess it's not straightforward as the resources are most / all from external providers, but it's a good thing to feed back to them for the reason above, also I'd have thought there must be video-to-text tools available now?

    Thanks,

    Andy

  • in reply to Andy Millar

    Hi Andy,

    Thanks for your feedback. We want to include as much information as possible in the hub on neurodiverse conditions, so we've made sure to include a variety of different resource types in the Resources section - including PDF guides, information booklets and online articles. I'd recommend taking another look to browse through all the resources - we've updated them with icons so it's easier to see each different resource format.

    In terms of accessibility, this is something we'll continue to look at and we'll be continuously updating the hub to add new content and improve our community members' experience - so we'll be looking at adding text-to-speech functions in future. In the meantime, for the videos, these do include subtitle functions within the videos themselves, so you can turn this feature on to read the transcript whilst watching. 

    If you have any other feedback/questions I'm all ears Slight smile

Reply
  • in reply to Andy Millar

    Hi Andy,

    Thanks for your feedback. We want to include as much information as possible in the hub on neurodiverse conditions, so we've made sure to include a variety of different resource types in the Resources section - including PDF guides, information booklets and online articles. I'd recommend taking another look to browse through all the resources - we've updated them with icons so it's easier to see each different resource format.

    In terms of accessibility, this is something we'll continue to look at and we'll be continuously updating the hub to add new content and improve our community members' experience - so we'll be looking at adding text-to-speech functions in future. In the meantime, for the videos, these do include subtitle functions within the videos themselves, so you can turn this feature on to read the transcript whilst watching. 

    If you have any other feedback/questions I'm all ears Slight smile

Children
  • in reply to Michael Hargreaves

    Yes you have different formats, the problem at the moment (and I do appreciate that this is an early work in progress) is that it's not for the same information? So for example the immediate features I was drawn to were "Re-wiring dyspraxia from the brain" and "How to get a diagnostic assessment" - the information in both of these appears only to be available as a video? The first of these is a bit irritating that it's not available as text, but the second one is really important that this is available in as many formats as possible - it's core information for this site.  

    Re videos: some people cope best with linear content, some don't. I'm one of those that (very much) doesn't. So it's not that I want subtitles, what I want is not to sit through an hour video for 10 minutes of the information which I'm actually after, and which I may want to re-read - and indeed then look back through earlier content. Pure written format just works vastly better for some types of neuro diversity (and far worse for others). Sorry about the micro-rant, it's not just here, there is a huge amount of information now that is being presented only in videos, which therefore does not take account of neuro diversity. It's just that in this case it's particularly ironic!

    Anyway very happy to continue this discussion elsewhere if I can help in any way, this is a hugely important issue I've been involved with for a long time and I'm delighted that Foothold has taken it on. And it's not at all easy to work out what to present and how to present it.

    Thanks,

    Andy

  • in reply to Andy Millar
    Andy Millar said:
    what I want is not to sit through an hour video for 10 minutes of the information which I'm actually after

    It's the Youtube generation!

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