How did you find out what you are good at

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Hi,

I am trying to help a relative with Aspergers find work and am just wondering how everyone here found out what they were good at and mike make a good sort of job. Should I suggest he tries lots of different things, he is very good at mental arithmetic and likes computers - facebook msn stuff like that and I was just wondering if suggesting programming/web developing might be an option that he could try. What would be the easiest way to try out things like this to see if he liked it?

Thanks for your help

I'm an Aspie and a programmer. A combination you may find quite often.
The job has several advantages if somebody belongs to the right thinking type, as you say your friend does.
You don't have too much contacts with customers if you're in the right company and people in IT are used to programmers behaving strange (not only the Aspies )

I found out that I like it and can do it good back in the 80s with the first homecomputers. That's no option nowadays.
So I would advice him to learn one of the smarter programming languages, that allow to get something up and running quite fast. Ruby would be a good start (another could be Python). To be avoided are complicated languages like C++, they cost too much time to start with. If he likes programming, he will soon enough be able to decide himself, what to learn next and he won't have wasted time learning Ruby.
Ruby and Python are free and you can download them without any costs. Same goes for some editors and a lot of other stuff. We are running our web business near purely on free oss software, so you can build up a whole business without any costs but some hardware (and even for that you can use cheap stuff if necessary)

For Ruby there is a web framework named Rails, which is free. With this Linux servers all our customers web sites are hosted. It allows very fast web development.

It is in general a good idea for Aspies to get good education & jobs, since the social problems (like bosses yelling at employees) are more likely to be found in areas, where people can be exchanged easily.

Thanks PilotPirx

I will take a look at Ruby on the rails (I'm a graphic designer - print based so have heard of it from design mags) and suggests he gives it a go.

He could do with having a definite skill like you suggest, at the moment he is just going for interviews for relatively unskilled work and of course there are lots of people going for those type of jobs.

I tried lot of things out (mostly because other people told me I should). I spent 10 years working with mainframe computers, at which I was very Very Good -- and bored completely out of my mind. On the good side, it paid quite well. It also became an obsolete job - that career field pretty much no longer exists. What I did next was to dive headfirst into the things I loved to do. I then found out that having to do them for a job, for pay, made them a drudge, a misery. Big Mistake.

What I think I probably would say, from experience, is that he should sit down and list the things that he does well.
Then look for patterns in his overall skills and abilities in all of that.
Then try to match those with fields of work.
Then list the various job possibilities in those fields given his education and training background.
Cross off those that he finds offensive.
Underline those in which he has a particular interest, if any.

Read up on several. Including the labor department's statistics as to what they think the future job prospects for beginning candidates in those fields might be.

Then look at those that are not offensive and see which he could do well enough to make an actual living at (i.e., more than minimum wage). If there's something he's really keen to try out, he should go for it. But he should allow himself an out - if it doesn't work out, there is no reason to continue it unless he is completely dependent on the income. If there's a way to try something out, say an unpaid internship if he can afford to do that, to see if it's a match, that might be a way to go.

Best of luck!