what are the biggest things autistic ppl need when working

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I work at a grocery store as customer service/service desk. My biggest needs are sensory related, grocery stores are quite noisy and trying to filter out all the background chaos while serving customers and working is difficult without earplugs. Before I figured this out, I thought my sensory overload symptoms were anxiety. And there were times when I'd have a quiet meltdown or partial shutdown while waiting on customers, when it was extremely busy.

I think I also get socially burnt out more easily than non-autistic people. Lately I have been very grouchy when dealing with customers, even when not in sensory overload. So my therapist and I feel that taking a mini vacation where I get 4 or so days I can just stay home every few months will help me be a better employee.

What are your experience with working as an autistic person?

I have worked/had a job more years than not since being of working age at 18 years old.

The result? A lot of burnout over the years, sometimes resulting in being out of work for more than a year at a time.

I'm glad I live in the UK where it's easier to survive than the US when transferring in & out of work.

For me, I would say it's decent training. For a long time now, I feel like I have been in situations where I get 70 to 75 percent of training I need, then it's up to me to figure out the other 25 to 30 percent that I have NOT been told.

It's getting worse over the years to the point where I just don't want to work anymore. I honestly feel I can't do anything right.

I'm capable of learning, but no one wants to train I guess. But then, when I get hired on the job, I don't get what I need. If I ask questions, there have been times when I didn't get any help at all, until it was obvious that I needed it.

It stuns me that I drove Uber after watching their very short training video. It gave me enough to get started, then I figured out other stuff on my own.

But teaching overseas, the best training I got was two weeks at my first teaching job. I stayed there for one and a half years. From then on, it ranged from four hours at a Starbucks, to basically nothing at all. The low-training jobs lasted from six weeks to 10 months.

So, for me, it's training. TELL me what you want me to do, then SHOW me what you want to do.

Despite the bad luck I've had with jobs here, every so often I have a student tell me he learns a lot from talking to me. That makes me feel good, but doesn't keep me from being fired.

I mainly work for myself now. But when I've been an employee it was:

* clear communication (just tell me what you want and then leave me alone to do it, rather than give me 50 tasks that change per week, half-baked instructions relayed to me late or via different employees that you do bother to talk to, or berating me for doing the exact thing you previously said you wanted)
* zero tolerance of back-stabbing/cliquey/nepotism behaviour (i.e. reward based on merit rather than who can lie/sabbotage/gossip the most or whether they are your family/mates, if you don't like working with outsiders then don't waste their time by hiring them and making them jump through insane hoops before sacking them)

But it's mainly communication and honesty. I think that applies to most employees though, NT or ND. Constantly changing the goalposts, being indecisive and unclear about what you want, giving people a task then forgeting to tell them that changes were decided with someone else behind their back and they've wasted the last x weeks working on that task as a result, then making people feel bad when they ask for more clarification, will drive anyone nuts. Probably more so if that person has autism, is logic/efficiency driven and actually cares about doing a good job rather than purely the money. Constantly finding out that you've wasted time/energy due to people not communicating starts to grind you down very quickly. Eventually you get demoralised and start looking for another job.

When I hire people, I do my best to be very clear about what's expected from the start, with set progress checks and no room for misinterpretation. If the other person isn't happy with that, they have the chance to turn down the offer. But anyone who does work for me knows exactly where they stand. I never expect anyone to be a mind reader.

What I need is repetition. I need a few tasks I know that I'm going to be doing instead of me being moved from station to station doing a plethora of different things. That way I know that I'm going to do A, B and C without the following letters of tasks. I also need clear communication and instructions. I also need to know that my coworkers will not treat me like trash just because I speak and act differently from them. It's supposed to be a job site, not a middle school.

Clear and direct communication is one of my work accommodations.

This is from my past. Didn't really get the enviroment I needed which caused me issues.

To be given a quiet enviroment with all the tools I needed with adequate lighting and so it is not too hot or cold, and a list of bikes to be repaired or built and when they were needed so I could prioritize them in order before I started working on them.

To then be allowed to do them in that order without keeping pulling me away to do other things (Thst was the worst (Shutdown risk!! !))... But also I would be repeating what I had done as I would have to start my list again as the disturbance would lose me where I was... So if I was PDI-ing bikes, I would PDI from the start again which took me far longer to do than if I had not been told to rush a quick job inbetween... Those rushed inbetween jobs the other staff were supposed to do but would pile them on me so thy could relax! Which meant every day I would have to work extra unpaid hours to finish my work because I had done all their work as well and it looked like I had not done my work at all!

Which is why I kept hitting burnout and breakdown (Whatever it was!)

The type of accommodations an autistic person have may vary with the job type.

A quiet corner with reduced lighting might be appropriate for an office job, whereas it wouldn't be possible to provide such an accommodation if a person worked some type of physical job that requires moving around a lot.

Quiet environment.
Written instructions
Clear instructions
Lack of chitchat
Not being seen as a cold rude person for refusing to partake in gossip

I can relate a lot to your sensory experience, for me when its bad I cannot make out or distinguish someone talking to me from background noise and even myself from a crowd when it's bad, leading to a shutdown more commonly these days, though when I was younger it would typically lead to a meltdown. I've only ever had volunteering jobs which I was passionate about but in one volunteering job for example my role involved customer service and I couldn't fulfil the role to the managers standards so she let me go, understandably. It hurt a bit at the time to be let go from a volunteering position but ultimately I got over it.

In retrospect I tried many times to work in different roles for that same organisation which I knew I could fulfil (inventory, stock, labelling, pricing - organisational tasks) as I tried to explain that my strengths were not in customer service but in the end I was just let go. I think if a job description doesn't necessitate every single role in its description employers could outsource some of the job title to another role where someone else could be suited perfectly for that work, it could benefit the employer too as just because an employee can't fulfil other roles in their job description doesn't mean they can't put that same effort into the other roles pertaining to that job description.