Three years have gone by since the program Autism at Work evolved, which was an initiative by the software multinational company SAP in collaboration with Specialisterne. What happened? More than 100 people with ASD are employed by SAP worldwide. And numbers will increase, as SAP, currently with 77.000 employees, intends to have 1% of its workforce consisting of people with ASD by the year 2020.
The more than 100 employees with ASD hired by SAP are working in 16 different areas, in 10 of the several SAP offices around the world. The jobs include software testing, development, technical support, network management, design, data analysis and so on.
Many details of the program were explained on March the 23rd, in Newton Square (USA), in the event “Autism at Work Summit”. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft, two of the largest companies in the IT industry whom Specialisterne collaborate with, also talked about their experiences of hiring people with ASD.
SAP sees its first three years as the initial phase, a learning period, and wants the following years to be the improvement and development phases, where hiring people with ASD will stop being a special program to become an integrated part of the Human Resources area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhioB6laWng&feature=youtu.be