About my experience on Employable Me

If you missed me on Employable Me last night, you can catch up on BBC iPlayer here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09k7wlj/employable-me-series-2-episode-4

The experience was a life-changing and eye-opening one, and I thank everyone who has seen it so far. I was inspired by an autistic acquaintance of mine who had appeared on the first series of Employable Me, and when the second series was making a casting call I applied, wishing to showcase my talents for political analysis that I have been developing since I started this blog four years ago. I was so pleased when I was accepted for the series, given that a few months prior I had failed to complete a graduate diploma in applied psychology and wanted to find a new path that was more suited to me in the long-term and more achievable for me than becoming a chartered psychologist. Even in undergraduate psychology I was very passionate about politics (and how psychology could be applied to it), but had never had the option to switch to a politics course.

At the time I had already made plans to move from Hertfordshire and further up north, which as I later learned also took me a further distance from where many political jobs are currently based-Greater London. I was therefore pleased when Rushcliffe Borough Council gave me a job as a counting assistant not only for the county council elections but also for the general election. I give my thanks to Charlotte, Katherine, and Allen for their hard and responsible work during this count and for giving me the chance to excel. Having been the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Hemel Hempstead in 2015, it was exciting to get a view from the election staff's side as well as the candidate's side.

I enjoyed working with the film crew all through the way and particularly the conversations I had with Nancy, who not only discovered my potential but also shared some interesting and important stories with me. She is the best psychologist I have encountered and her CIC, Genius Within, is an inspiration to so many and has been very supportive throughout.

I also had a good time with Erica, Nicola, Marve, Kerie and others who appeared on Employable Me and who had their own great stories to tell, and I am glad to have caught up again with Erica in particular these past few months.

We have so much to share to this world out there, whatever obstacles we must overcome or whatever disability we have.

Comments

  1. Unknown19 December 2017 at 21:03

    Your talents are immense Alan it surprises me that potential employers are yet to see this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PAUL WADY20 December 2017 at 09:14

    You are a classic case of a gifted person who will end up creating their own niche work. Find things only you can do. I think it’s a cliche of our autistic kind. Then you become a specialist and an expert in the job market.

    ReplyDelete
  3. mosmosmos20 December 2017 at 22:55

    Alan, really enjoyed the way you came across on the show, and you gave a really good account of yourself. If I was an employer, I'd take you on in a heartbeat.

    I suffer from Aspergers myself, although clearly don't have the same degree of autism as you I'd guess, but clearly enough for my girlfriend to say "that's you!" on more than one occasion.

    I hope you find the roles you are looking for and I'm sure your appearance on the show has done a lot of good as you clearly came across as exceptionally intelligent and analytical with a completely different way of looking at problems. In my work, that is pretty much my USP, my autism allows me to think around problems and issues a completely different way to everyone else and come up with solutions, and it's a really fun way of working.

    All the best and good look in whatever you end up doing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous21 December 2017 at 22:21

    Nice one on challenging EON about their investment in renewable energy.
    It shows how arbitrary what is correct can be that one guy didn't like cardigans and at EON - nobody wore a tie. There are lots of organisations that recruit people with autism for skills like yours Alan. Check out http://auticon.co.uk/careers/ - they have a range of analyst jobs - starting off in the junior / graduate positions where you'll end up making a lot of money.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous21 December 2017 at 22:23

    Your haircut looked really smart Alan.
    Just remember to always check your shirt is tucked in.
    (wearing a jumper is good way to hide untucked shirts) and you will do grand.
    Keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Robert Lindsay25 December 2017 at 10:30

    Alan I really enjoyed the show and your part on it. Pleased to be able to give you some employment, albeit part time, at the Association of Green Councillors.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Robert Lindsay25 December 2017 at 10:30

    Alan I really enjoyed the show and your part on it. Pleased to be able to give you some employment, albeit part time, at the Association of Green Councillors.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alan B25 December 2017 at 20:49

      Thank you, Robert. I enjoy contributing to their hard work. Please PM me further details. Alan.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more