Value -- seeing what you are worth as a whole

Once I finish on the Aspie/HFA friendly workplace I will be starting on an article about establishing your value to an employer. It can be a hard concept for people to grasp as it devolves the common concept of a worker and dehumanizes the worker.

To illustrate think of gold for a moment. What is the value of gold? And I am not talking about the monetary exchange value of it but the actual intrinsic value. What makes gold valuable is what someone else can do with it. The nature of gold as a malleable metal that is pleasing to the eye and in limited supply makes it valuable. Just sitting in a vein in the ground, gold has the same value of any other rock in that it takes up space.

Shifting that thinking to a person the Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Experience possessed by the individual have no value in and of themselves. They simply indicate what is there for another person to make use of. Much in the same way that the malleability of gold is useless if the gold is not mined and brought to the surface for a smith, the ability to do advance mathematics in a person is useless if it is not brought to the front and exposed to those around them.

So the point of the resume/interview process is to establish your value by bringing all of your relevant or even possibly relevant skills to view with the employer. ASD people tend to have a lot of talents that are difficult to display given traditional resume methods. Interviews are even worse because it can highlight some of the difficulties we endure such as communication. It is my goal with ASD Job Sink to help create a value proposition that is easy to communicate in the interview.