Is it typical to have a bad employment history?

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It's in the public education field, you follow to a code of conduct, you receive a paycheck which is taxed, it's a real goddam motherfu**ing job.

Thnks. I wish I had thought to say that at the time.

Apparently gaps in employment are extremely common with people on the spectrum. Employers get frustrated easily with them and fail to accomodate them in appropriate ways. We need to find ways around this.

I have had huge gaps in my employment and none of my jobs lasted more than three years. I wasn't fired, I just got laid off from and one of them I quit because I was laid off from full time work due to the economy so I hardly worked, it was more like once a month whenever someone call in sick. But I quit that job because I went into training for another job and then I graduated from it and I was unemployed for a four months again and only worked three days in April and then was unemployed until June 2010 and have been working ever since.


Finding jobs has never been my forte. I can keep a job but I can never find one easily. Only time I ever got one quick was in 2007 and it took me three weeks to get one after I started looking. But I call that luck.

My huge gaps were a few months. But the job I have now will probably be my longest unless something else happens that makes me lose my job like the building decides to kick out the employees from the company I work for and employ their own people to clean. Then I be waiting again to start working again. I refuse to quit my job if they cut my hours because I don't want a huge gap in my employment and I would rather make money than none at all so I would rather look for another job but then I had found out that if you are still employed, other places won't want to hire you because they think your current employment will interfere with the job you're applying for now. I guess they don't realize you will quit your other job. Murphy's law there.


Yeah looking for work has never been my forte. My husband has to help me so that is why I am employed again.

The bottom two lines are me. I just don't have the skills to get benefits. They will say I made myself unemployed so no unemployment benefit, and I live with family so no housing benefit. I have lots of qualifications and have had a lot of jobs, but it always falls apart after a couple of years. The company goes bust, or I get fired for a reason that makes no sense to me, or it just becomes too stressful.

if it weren't for a bit of financial luck, i'd be living under a bridge someplace. i don't fit anyplace other than in my hermithole.

I'm feeling a little better about myself reading about everyone else's struggles to find work and keep it. It doesn't help me either that I have family members that harp about it behind my back and think I'm lazy or my mom is enabling me or some crap like that.

Can only speak for myself.

During my last 10 years of employment, prior to switching to independent/self employed, I can count at least 10 jobs and I am sure there were more.

I would regularly call in sick, sometimes as much as weekly, because I just couldn't bear to go into the living hell that was 'the office'

It is a miracle that I managed to maintain any kind of employment during that 10 year period!

This is what made me constantly on the brink of losing my job. I was scared of losing it, so I quit a couple places and moved on. My last job, I managed to keep it for 2 years, but I was trading shifts a lot/calling in. None of my coworkers liked me much, for reasons I couldn't ever figure out. I always did my work though, and never had complaints from customers, and since my shifts were always covered, they couldn't fire me. Unfortunately, 3 months before I was fired, my meds seemed to have stopped working. I started missing more, I actually had a couple customer complains (which I could never figure out why they were complaining, or WTF they were accusing me of), and I started actually taking the 20 minute breaks we were allowed, except I was laying down and closing my eyes. Apparently, closing your eyes during your break is not allowed. Employees also complained I wasn't doing my job, which I thought was bullcrap, because I thought I was. Anyway, they finally fired me.
We tried adding something to my meds, but it didn't do anything to help.
I was diagnosed with Asperger-Tendecies and bipolar 2 a few months back. The Aspergers makes sense, and the person I'm going to said it's hard to officially diagnose adults with Aspergers since as they get older, they can usually learn/teach themselves to deal and work with social situations to an extent, but she felt I did have it.
I think it's more the issue of having to go into the social situation. I always had a strong work ethic and did work hard, but I always had problems more with coworkers, or when my depression/anxiety kicked in, which I really think stems from bad experiences with the social aspect growing up.

Lets see my following jobs lists

Part Time Work
1986-90 - Adventure Games and Hobbies - Part time manager doing cashier, stock management, and ran game demos. Best job ever but the shop went out of business.
1988 - SuperDuper Market - Fired for being too slow in the produce department.
1988 - Burger King - Worked five hour then quit.
1988 - Arby's - Worked two weeks then quit when a former bully of mine offered me job when he saw me in the drive thru and felt sorry for me so he gave me a job.
1988-91- Cayuga Landscapping Worked off and on let go for being slow
1991 - Tops Market - worked 6 months quit for a better paying job
1991-2000 Swiss Chalet - Restaurant work making salads, washing dishes, and helping where needed the boss hardly fired anyone so you can do anything including bully autistic employees. I quit after a violent and bloody meltdown.

Full Time Employment
2000 - SPS Hiring - I had six or seven jobs through this temp agency each one was dirty unsafe and loud. I was let go from each job for being slow. They finally sent me to a machine shop job where it was clean and the employees were not nasty towards me.
2000-09 - Machine Shop - I sucked at the working the machines the noise and vibrations made me nervous and anxious. A metal finisher got mad so he quit so they gave me a shot at the job. My first time doing it without training I did better then the original metal polisher. It was a great job I worked in the backroom by myself. I was laid off in 09' because the jobs that needed metal polishing ran out and the new jobs did not need a metal polisher.
2010-2011 - Unemployed. But durring this time I discovered I have Aspergers Syndrome so it was not a total lost. At least I no longer think I am insane.

For much of my working life, I bounced from job to job. If I got frustrated or bored, I tended to quit. Sometimes my actions got me dismissed.

Things have changed, but really, the matter is more one of trying to find where I fit.

Until recently, my longest term of employment was at a grocery store. So long as you showed up and did your job without having to be watched all day, they were happy to keep you. Not that no issues happened, but I ultimately left that job for what I thought would be "greener pastures." It turned out to be a mistake. Went back to school, worked while in school...consistently because I knew by this point that bouncing job-to-job did not help me get better opportunities.

However, I think I'm a bit of a victim of bad timing. I tried to stay with the same employer for as long as the arrangement worked out. Finished school only to have 9/11 ruin the job market...few jobs and lots of newly unemployed people. I wound up in dead end jobs...again. Did data entry work (self employed). Finally got a job as a case manager, but budget cuts forced the termination of my position. Did a short time as a route attendant for a vending machine company. Finally got a job as a glorified secretary. Been here for 7 years now. The "boss" tolerates my quirks and is too lazy to try and find a replacement, so it works. I've been trying to get a better job for the last 5 years...no luck so far.

Between my "personality" and the lack of opportunity for something better than what I now have, I feel like I'm stuck in one place.

I'm going to quit my job in a month and I've only had it for 14 months. I have to for reasons I can't really disclose. I've been fired from retail jobs that I did as a teenager. Most of my work history is part-time. My work history isn't terrible, as there are no really big gaps of unemployment (that will probably change once I leave my current job, lol) but it isn't exactly stellar. I get stressed-out easily.

I'm the same as you guys. I held one job for 2 years, which wasn't a 'real' job to begin with, but was fit to help people who were struggling to find employment in the first place because of all kinds of personal problems, but I felt as though it was real work. It was nice enough, I'll admit, it mainly consisted of repairing books. I thought I was doing something useful and I could get along with most of my colleagues. But at the end of my run, the supervisors tried to move me into a program of more 'supervised work', while I wanted a regular job. So I left. And then I worked at a factory for six months, where I enjoyed myself well enough- however I couldn't keep up with the production rate, didn't manage to get the necessary speed. And to top that off, I kind of got into conflict with one of the established employees, which I think influenced the manager's decision to discontinue my contract.

I recognise what many people write here, when it comes to the relationship with colleagues. Sometimes, just by being myself, being aloof, quiet... it puts other people off. Without trying to be offensive, or weird, honestly. Sometimes, I've even tried to patch things up with a colleague, but to little effect. I've been astounded at how quickly someone else can judge you as basically not worth talking to. Being judged as 'too weird'.
Fortunately, on the other hand, I've always had colleagues with whom I had a great rapport.

My work history for someone almost aged 32 is uugggh.

I got my first job after college (28 years old). It lasted only 9 months. I was fired because the supervisor had a personal vendetta against me supposedly having to do with something I said. The director did not want to fire me but was pressured by the supes.

Second job was a cashier job at a college which I managed to hold on to until they decided to close down the place for remodeling. This meant I along with employees who worked there 10-20 years lost their incomes. I lasted there from september 2009 through June 2010.

I moved to France in hopes of reversing my fortunes. I was taking care of my granny who has Alzheimer's and who has since passed away about 2 weeks ago. I was hopelessly unemployed until I applied to work at McDonald's. I was hired. The first 2 weeks went fine but as time went on, I was stressing out. My co workers were youngsters who teased and tormented me. One of them flat out bullied me because he could get away with it. He is tight with one of the managers. I thought that as long as there was injustice like this, I was not going to get a fair shake. I quit exactly 2 months after starting there.

Here I am unemployed yet again. Let's see what fate has in store for me.

Seems that aspies really need a job that runs like clockwork. I do work, but really struggle with unexpected side issues or changes to my regular routine. Also the work history on my CV is around 75% fiction! Where I am the job market is slightly more healthy than elsewhere, so getting the job is fairly easy, keeping it is not! The longest i've held a job is 4 years taking emergency calls and that was only due to morbid interest.

You didn't know that? Dude, have you been to this site? It seems like being aspie means you struggle worse in just about every aspect of life, and a lot of it comes back to interpersonal problems or some kind. It's like discrimination hell for most of us.