Frank Dog's Profile

Get a spray bottle of some kind—Steve used a backpack-type garden sprayer that you pump up, so you can carry a lot of water. Soak a sweaty T-shirt in a bucket of water overnight, to get a good human scent. Load the sprayer with this water. Go to a parking lot and lay a straight line of this scented water about four yards long on the pavement. The point is, YOU can SEE it, so you can tell when the dog is working on the scent. Click the dog for noticing the line, then for sniffing at it, then for nosing along

Statistics show that the majority of adults with Asperger syndrome do not hold down full-time jobs and struggle finding and retaining work. However, there any also a number of people who find employment which suits their skills, minimises their difficulties and allows them to flourish. In my research for this book, I was interested to not only highlight the areas in which people with Asperger syndrome frequently struggled, but also where they blossomed. By doing so, I hoped to be able to identify common success factors for employment for people with Asperger syndrome, which could be replicated by others. We may know what doesn’t work, but in order to move forward, we need to know what does.



The difficult areas are not always task-related, as this is a person who can be highly competent and accurate in their work, but may be related to the peripheral but inescapable aspects of employment; the journey to work, break-times, relationships, politics and social interaction. For me, this is one of the most mis-understood aspects of Asperger syndrome by many people, the understanding that just because someone is highly academically qualified, that this does not equate to an ability to deal with a customer complaint, multi-task or cope with rush hour public transport: ‘Of course, he can get on a bus, he’s got a degree’. They are not on the same scale or use the same bits of the brain.



Consequently, the people who seemed to experience the greatest success in employment were those who had found a job which wasn’t too stressful and allowed them to do something they loved – and as a general rule, didn’t involve too many people!

According to statistics released by the NAS, the employment rate for people with Asperger's Syndrome is 12%