Aspergers substitute for College degree?

[EEor Not]

Diagnosed 1999 by UCLA Psychology Dept.

I have had a successful 30 year career as an electrical engineer. As you might imagine, college in the early 1980s was a disaster, dropped out due to failing grades. However today I live in a million + neighborhood and have been at the absolute top of my field salary range since the mid 1980s. I have also held several VP level positions however the people management side of that job was not stellar performance as you would expect. The technical side was performed with flying colors.

Luckily, my vast experience gets me into job interviews that traditionally require BS, often MS degrees. Yet managers who interview me are skeptical of my background lacking such degrees.

My question is in today's society, is disclosing Asperger's Syndrome as the reason for lack of formal education a good idea? It would explain how I am able to do this work lacking formal education. OTOH, does it label me a misfit and destroy opportunities?

I guess my wish full thinking is that savy technical companies today recognize Aspie's make exceptional engineers - no degree required?

 

[WereBear]

I guess my wish full thinking is that savy technical companies today recognize Aspie's make exceptional engineers - no degree required?

I don't know if I am right, but that is what I went went this summer when I told my boss. He has an IT background, we have a known Aspie working as a programmer, and I wanted him to know why I'd had so many health issues, and was not going to these giant events.

And it was okay. Sooooo; might be worth a try.

 

[On the Inside]

Similar story here, never finished a degree program, though tried several times. Still managed to have a (until recently) successful career in a challenging and somewhat social field. Not tech, more old school engineering/design/prototyping.

My recent struggles have been entirely ASD related, and in my last review, I told my department manager that I am a diagnosed Aspie. I hadn't planned on it, it just came out because I finally saw how the condition was directly effecting my performance.

Really not sure what effect disclosing has/will have, I kind of wish I hadn't brought it up. Our organization is facing some challenges, and unless a few contracts are finalized, there may be some layoffs in the coming year. Now I feel vulnerable/using my condition to get special consideration.

Really, I have wanted to get a different job for quite some time, as I have never really liked the work environment here, but lacking a degree, I worry, is going to make that harder. I have applied to a few jobs over the last couple of years that I was qualified for, except the degree, but have not yet landed a new position. My "selling myself" skills are not the best.

 

[Mia]

Good friend of mine is a programmer, he was accepted to university at the age of sixteen. He didn't complete his degree. He knows some of the early programming languages as well as most of the new ones, and he's self taught.

He's lived all over the world, and is still traveling, currently he works in Chile, but lived for four years in Vienna, three in Buenos Aires, about five in Rome, many years in Canada and the US. He's a brilliant programmer and engineer. And he likes his life exactly the way it is.

Don't know if he has any difficulty at all finding employment, I know there were periods in his life where he didn't work, but he was always willing to move somewhere in the world for a job. He negotiates salary and job parameters better than anyone I know, it helps that he speaks five languages, three he spoke as a child, the other two he's learned in the last ten years.

 

[jayraytee]

I have no college education, and I work in the technical field. Where I work, they pay me as a technician, but yet treat me as an engineer and I often am teaching the other engineers how to do certain things. I have talked to my boss about this, not that I have aspergers, but that I feel I need to move up. He agrees and said I could easily be an engineer and told me to apply for those positions. I applied through our company employment system which is a third party and my applications never make it to his desk. I am filtered out due to a lack of a degree. It's ridiculous, I've seen some educated idiots hired into these positions, which just adds a little more fuel to my fire.

I've never told anyone at work at my aspergers, although if they know anything of it, they would probably know anyway. I don't know if telling people would help or hurt.

 

[Nitro]

I was a natural at mechanical engineering with no formal schooling. I was brought up in a machine shop setting and learned tool and die making work well before I was 16 years old. I use my eidetic abilities to compare situations of both successful and failed scenarios to make adjustments to my own applications. I never had trouble finding work because the whiz kid was always wooed by other outfits after they were witness to what I was capable of.

Early on in my career path,I was made the head of my department at the age of 21 where we both designed and built quadrupole mass spectrometer probe assemblies.I went into their history books as the youngest ever to hold a management position.I actually defected from there and went on to design and manufacture sublimation equipment that was used for developing prototype semiconductor chips that helped startups in the Silicon Valley during the early to mid eighties.

Two positions I held required me to work in class 10 clean rooms for my assembly work. Talk about autie heaven
By working my way around several industries,my butt did get to polish the CEO chair before forced into an early retirement by my disability.

I'm not sure how it would fly to share your status with the working world where many may view it as a detriment.I was never suspected of being on the spectrum until researching another issue I was having with my brain and stumbled upon it accidently.

 

[On the Inside]

I do know that now I told my department head that I have ASD, there is no way I'll be considered for a management position. I did interview for one a few years back, but was passed over by two others. So I'm pretty much at the apex of my career if I stay with my current organization. There is no more moving up the ladder here for me.

 

[cory]

I excelled in school. Got an academic scholarship to a flagship State University. Started teaching other undergraduate chemistry courses (for the university) when i was in my second year. Was heavily recruited by PhD programs directly from undergraduate (I ended up with a choice between the #3 and #8 schools in the country). PhD programs for hard sciences (biochemistry and organic synthetic chemistry in my case) are paying jobs you work as a faculty member for the university at while you get a PhD degree. So at 22 i was a paid facuilty member for the #3 school in the US and getting to go to school for free. I excelled in the lab setting. I began getting cluster headaches during my third year and it was dehibiliating enough to force me to drop out. I'm an aspie who can't help thinking to much and I started getting pain at the level of torture and it scrambled me for a while. Being able to visualize small molecules in three dimensions is something most people need a computer to do for them but I can do in my head. The faculty were very kind to me when I was ill. I still correspond with my PhD mentor and the dean of the program.

 

[Polymath14]

I wouldn't say that I've had any coworkers that were aspies that I knew about.

As an aspie myself, I've never disclosed this to an employer before and tried very hard to keep it under wraps with going to college and all.

College was a nightmare for me, but I made it through with a degree in Mathematics. Not much social activity required.

I'd consider myself pretty good (I'm a programmer); I'm on the verge of getting a promotion this week that several people I considered competent that have been in the field for over 10 years I am getting to their level in just a hair over two years. That's pretty good. My most recent performance review went very well and he boasted about how smart I was and the way I thought like an engineer.

I've only ever told one coworker that I had it and some of my old college friends other than my girlfriend's family.