An Unlikely Journey to SAP
The story of how an unlikely “wildcard” candidate was able to make a career at SAP because of Autism at Work
In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, we’re having a month-long series highlighting the voices of SAP employees participating in the company’s Autism at Work program. The third installment in the series is written by Raphael Bivas, a Data Analyst for Cloud Operations at SuccessFactors in South San Francisco. To read rest of the series, click here.
I was an unlikely candidate to have enrolled in the Autism at Work Program because I have never actually been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder or any of its predecessors. Instead, I had been diagnosed with Non-Verbal Learning Disability.
Non-Verbal Learning Disability is generally viewed as a residual diagnosis for people who appear to be on the autism spectrum, but technically do not meet the clinical definition. (I could probably write an entire research article just about the politics and controversies surrounding diagnoses and labels both within the clinically recognized autism spectrum and between autism and related conditions.)
I was also an unlikely candidate because, uncharacteristically for someone on the spectrum, and especially for someone who grew up in Silicon Valley, I did not show a natural affinity for technology or engineering. Instead, I was drawn to science and math.
My interests led me to study neuroscience and biostatistics in undergraduate and graduate school, respectively. After finishing graduate school, I looked for work in fields related to my studies, but I was called for only a handful of interviews and I did not receive any promising offers.
I was an unlikely candidate to have enrolled in the Autism at Work Program because I have never actually been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Since my diagnosis was always fuzzy, I did not initially think to reach out to the Department of Rehabilitation (DOR) for help with the job search. After about a year of relying only on employment agencies and career counselors that did not specialize in clients who had disabilities, I finally set up an intake appointment with my local Vocational Rehabilitation counselor. My counselor referred me to Evolibri, an agency that specializes in providing career counseling and soft-skills training to people on the autism spectrum.
A few months after I opened my case with the DOR, the career counselor at Evolibri recommended that I enroll in the next hiring round of the Autism at Work program. I had actually heard about the program about a year earlier from a news clipping that my cousin sent to me. Since I heard of the program, I had kept the prospect of working for SAP in the back of my head, but, for the reasons mentioned above, I doubted that I would be an ideal candidate for the program.
Despite my doubts that I was an ideal candidate for the program, I kept being advanced through the selection process. After the orientation and the pre-screening process, I was one of 16 who attended the then-new week-long soft skills training. Then, I was then one of the lucky nine (originally intended to be eight) candidates who would do the five-week-long Lego Mindstorms training and job placement preparation stage of the process.
What I did not realize at first going into that stage of the process was that there were three more candidates than there were immediate job openings. Some candidates, including myself, were advanced anyway because the program directors at SAP believed that those candidates could still find opportunities soon even if they were not ideal matches for any of the known immediate openings. In addition to coming in with data analysis experience, I also had a small amount of programming experience and familiarity with Lego Mindstorms from a couple of computer science courses that I took during college.
Even though I may have had an opportunity to have been matched to one of the six available openings, I remained a “wildcard” throughout the program.
Job placement is as much about finding the right job for the candidate as it is about finding the right candidate for the job.
In the end, I was glad that I was not one of the first picks because job placement is as much about finding the right job for the candidate as it is about finding the right candidate for the job. Soon enough, the program directors found the right job for me.
During the last two weeks, while most other candidates were doing dry runs of working with their putative future teams, I was working with the two other wildcards on developing a program that could perform automated data analysis on web traffic data. Since the three of us were not able to seamlessly integrate all our individual contributions in time, our final presentation was more a proof-of-concept than an actual demonstration of our program.
Nevertheless, my portion of the presentation, which consisted primarily of explanations of the various metrics and visualizations that our program could theoretically provide, impressed one of the executive sponsors of the program so much that he recommended me for a data analyst position that had just opened up.
I did not know until the last minute of the program that I would be placed at SuccessFactors and that I would start at the same time as the rest of the candidates in the cohort who were placed there.
Since then, I’ve been working at SAP for almost two years now.
I am glad that the Autism at Work program exists, as it allows job candidates on the spectrum to know that they can be welcome at a company like SAP. It also lets people who are on the spectrum know that they can be open about their disability when looking for work, even if their disability is not obvious. The program also demonstrates that a company can be willing to provide accommodations during the hiring process to ensure that job candidates on the spectrum can be judged fairly for their ability to contribute to the company.
