Rules and Guidelines
Want to participate in the discussions? Please read our Community Rules and Guidelines. Need some help? Visit Support and Answers.

  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 19 replies
  • Subscribers 14 subscribers
  • Views 2713 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
You may also be interested in
This discussion is locked.
You cannot post a reply to this discussion. If you have a question start a new discussion

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

  • In my experience it's usually the neurotypicals not in engineering that cause the greater problems ;-)
    M

  • in reply to mapj1

    Oh Mike...you have no idea (actually you probably do Grinning ) how much of my life as an ISA I spend jumping up and down in front of engineering teams - sometimes literally - saying "you can't just say 'well the user shouldn't do that' when you should have someone on your team who knows the user IS going to do that!" Actually my favourite is when you get two engineering teams, one being the "end user" for the other, and neither of whom can get into the head of the other. Absolute classic being designers and installers / maintainers. I often use as an example the HAZID where we identified a hazard that loose equipment covers were unacceptable as they could get swept up by a passing train and very horrible things could happen. The designers' answer was that they would write in the manual that covers must be securely replaced after maintenance. A good old maintainer there put it bluntly: "write what you like, if it's two o'clock in the morning, and p***ing down with freezing rain, they're going to just sling the covers in the ditch at the end of the job and sign off".

    What I've always found interesting is getting mixed teams together of some engineers who are, shall we say, very focussed on engineering and come up with brilliant solutions, some who are very focussed on engineering in a different way and will pedantically step through the solutions to find the holes, and some who are really good at getting into the end users' head so that the end solution is actually useful to someone. And then the real fun of getting all those engineers to respect each other's strengths (which of course is where having some understanding of neurodiversity, whether by name or not, is really useful). And yes there have been times when I've had to literally stop fights breaking out between two engineers because one couldn't understand why the other was thinking the way they were...as indeed we see on these forums!

    So I'd say, to take the old marketing cliché, for "problems", read "opportunities" ;-)

Reply
  • in reply to mapj1

    Oh Mike...you have no idea (actually you probably do Grinning ) how much of my life as an ISA I spend jumping up and down in front of engineering teams - sometimes literally - saying "you can't just say 'well the user shouldn't do that' when you should have someone on your team who knows the user IS going to do that!" Actually my favourite is when you get two engineering teams, one being the "end user" for the other, and neither of whom can get into the head of the other. Absolute classic being designers and installers / maintainers. I often use as an example the HAZID where we identified a hazard that loose equipment covers were unacceptable as they could get swept up by a passing train and very horrible things could happen. The designers' answer was that they would write in the manual that covers must be securely replaced after maintenance. A good old maintainer there put it bluntly: "write what you like, if it's two o'clock in the morning, and p***ing down with freezing rain, they're going to just sling the covers in the ditch at the end of the job and sign off".

    What I've always found interesting is getting mixed teams together of some engineers who are, shall we say, very focussed on engineering and come up with brilliant solutions, some who are very focussed on engineering in a different way and will pedantically step through the solutions to find the holes, and some who are really good at getting into the end users' head so that the end solution is actually useful to someone. And then the real fun of getting all those engineers to respect each other's strengths (which of course is where having some understanding of neurodiversity, whether by name or not, is really useful). And yes there have been times when I've had to literally stop fights breaking out between two engineers because one couldn't understand why the other was thinking the way they were...as indeed we see on these forums!

    So I'd say, to take the old marketing cliché, for "problems", read "opportunities" ;-)

Children
No Data

Join us to get the best from IET EngX.

Joining EngX lets you personalise your experience so you stay up to date on the topics that interest you, plus you’ll be able to make connections who are looking to collaborate, exchange ideas and more.

Join us Not now

Community Rules & Guidelines