Social enterprise that exclusively employs adults on the autism spectrum

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Founded by Dirk Müller-Remus in Berlin in 2011 with investment from the Munich and London-based Ananda Social Venture Fund, Auticon is the first enterprise that exclusively employs adults on the autism spectrum as IT consultants.

Inspiration for the company came when Mr Müller-Remus’ own son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.

Mr Müller-Remus was dismayed by the employment prospects on offer to autistic people, and decided to build a company which created long-term sustainable jobs for adults on the autism spectrum.

Auticon currently employs more than 150 IT consultants in the UK, US, Germany, Italy and France. Here in the UK, clients include Linklaters, KPMG, Experian and GlaxoSmithKline.

Autistic adults often have extraordinary cognitive abilities, yet many find it difficult to secure or maintain mainstream employment.

Auticon taps into this potential; consultants bring a unique skillset to clients’ IT projects, including pattern recognition, logic, precision, sustained concentration, and an ability to intuitively spot errors.

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These skills are of particular value in areas such as quality management, security, compliance and business intelligence – which is the main scope of Auticon’s service portfolio.

Our consultants’ strengths lie in different areas and skills, and can work across a multitude of IT projects.

Auticon has developed a deep understanding of each consultant’s capabilities and works closely with clients to match those capabilities to a specific role within projects – delivering outstanding results. We don’t interview and don’t focus on CVs – instead we’re interested in what people can do and have a whole range of ways to look at candidates’ technical and cognitive skills.

We want to find out how our candidates think and have developed a range of assessments to understand cognitive profiles.

Most organisations focus a lot on CVs and interviews. This places a big focus on what people have been doing in the past and their social skills or ability to sell their skills in an interview setting.

In many cases, however, social skills may not even be crucial for the role – you may risk turning down a brilliant data analyst for the lack of a skill that isn’t even relevant to the role.