Career searching can be overwhelming and dificult without knowing the proper directions and guidance, especially for those with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While recent advances in job search platforms have contributed to reducing the time and efort for job seekers in accomplishing their goals, these technologies do not provide specialized support for seekers in the Autism spectrum (ASD). In reality, only a fraction of ASD can land on their career path using such support while fighting against their unique disorders that afect their daily routine and social activities. In this position paper, we explore a new design space of collaborative career-seeking design for ASDs. In particular, we aim to explore how future designers can leverage technology and AI to motivate ASDs to efectively collaborate with their social capital (i.e., professional helpers such as career coaches and their near surroundings such as their family and friends) in their career-seeking process. ASD's employment searching process highly difers from people in the neurotypical spectrum (NTs). Therefore, designing an interactive system for ASD needs special considerations, and most of the existing interface/research has not explored this area suficiently.
broaden the professional network by allowing
individuals to connect through the service providers. Users can
Employment is a crucial contributing factor to socioeco- search for jobs online, get training and apply for their
denomic development and improving the quality of life for sired positions with less efort through these applications.
people in the autistic spectrum [
The emergence of advanced AI-driven technology [7, 8, on helping people with ASDs to collaborate with their 9, 10, 11] has made the employment searching and hiring key surroundings in their job search. We hope the design process more accessible for the majority of job seekers. space of Collaborative Job Search for People with ASD can As a result, plenty of job-searching tools and websites, provide insights to future designers who work on this such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and Upwork, are be- design space. ing developed and used for job searches. These platforms The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the preliminary design space in detail. Section 3 conveys some limitations of this research and lastly, we concluded with our future work directions.
get a job can share their experience with other ASD members (outside of their family) and guide them. Assuming We aim to design a collaborative job-seeking experience these diferent stakeholders can perform all possible comfor people on the autism spectrum. In particular, we seek munications and connect to each other through a single to understand how the new design can better help ASD platform. In that case, the platform will create an extento get advantaged by their key social surroundings in sive network where everyone could benefit from each their job-seeking process. other.
In characterizing the targeted users, we focus on the How AI can mediate the communication and
inpeople of ASD between Level 1 and Level 2, who may formation exchange throughout the process: AI can
have challenges in having a job at a prestigious work- facilitate multiple support depending on stakeholder
dyplace while can still operate ordinary tasks. Challenges namics and communication needs. For example, there
may include how to connect our target users with local might be cases when professionals or career experts want
businesses better so that our target users would be more to share some sensitive information with parents/family
likely to look for jobs in their current living areas. Lo- members, but they don’t want to deliver that information
cal jobs are focused as we expect our target users to be by themselves. AI can work as a medium between this
less likely or do not wish to move out from their family kind of communication and provide necessary
suggesand familiar social infrastructure [
Since there can be multiple considerations in designing interpret hundreds of languages. A real-time transcripgroupware for our problem, we thought emphasizing the tion feature will be helpful in this scenario while chatting following aspects could yield design requirements/guide- or conversing. lines that lead to success in their teamwork. Some possi- Job search stage-wise design The baseline design ble considerations are as follows: will include some generic features that can be similar to
Division of roles between stakeholders: There can the design for neurotypical people. For example, users be varying roles and responsibilities among the stake- may be able to search for a job, create a repository/proholders based on their unique situations for job search, ject, apply for jobs, schedule interviews, update materials, which we are unaware of. Understanding the role of each etc. Such a stage-wise design can inherit the properties user is essential for designing a collaborative platform. of generic design but it can also be evolved based on the Every case is unique; for example, the role of a family three stakeholders’ unique needs. A customized chatbot member of job seeker A is not the same as the role of or assistant is helpful for tracking all application stathe parent of job seeker B. In a situation where every- tuses, and upcoming schedules and managing personal one shares a common goal, the system can suggest its resources. Sometimes, parents may want to have a cerusers adopt some generic guidelines for initiating the tain degree of control over their child’s resources or work employment-seeking process. Expert career profession- on their behalf through an entire application process. The als can play a significant role here in specifying these system can allow configuring of such permissions so that guidelines. In other situations where individuals’ cases multiple users can work together on a single project. are unique, the users can still share how they perform Prominently highlighting the nearest deadlines, distintheir tasks, their roles, and their concerns. guishing the jobs advertise that already have passed, and
Characteristics of communication between stake- filtering the most suitable options are some features that
holders: Each stakeholder may have diferent informa- have been considered valuable for future assistive design
tion needs. The focus would be on what types of commu- in the past literature [
Most of all, we expect researchers to work on the prob- 4. Extending the design with underrepresented and lem space of collaborative job search for people with vulnerable people beyond ASDs. ASDs would need to conduct a formative study with their expected stakeholders. For example, we find the Acknowledgments current literature is missing (1) an understanding of the challenges ASDs face using everyday technology (e.g., The authors wish to extend their appreciation for the LinkedIn) and (2) an identification of how a new design generous support from NSF Future of Work at the Humancan facilitate their social interaction to improve their Technology Frontier. career-seeking experiences.
Our proposed work will allow us to understand the challenges that people with ASD would face in shaping their careers and develop a novel tool to help the ASDs better leverage their social capital to establish their selfrealization. However we may face some limitations in particular scenarios, for instance, some ASDs may not have any supporting peers to help their job-seeking process. Especially families of low socioecological status can be limited in helping job seekers on the spectrum for the lack of time, low digital literacy, or other restricted factors. We look forward to overcoming these issues and devising future design considerations to develop better accessible tools in the context of collaborative careersearching experiences for the autism community. To make a more tangible impact in practice, we believe further research and deployment should follow.
While extensive research [