Stories

Neurodivergent Leadership Part 3: Real Life Case Study – Scott Howe

“How autism and learned behaviours can be a strong combination in leadership” 4-minute read Meet Scott Howe, an impressive business leader with a background in the military. Scott is also autistic. Scott’s route into his first career was accidental. Growing up in England, he applied to join the Royal Marines Commandos, never believing he’d be...

2-minute read Xceptional’s custom built platform allows autistic job seekers to demonstrate their skills by completing tasks, puzzles and activities in a safe online environment.The platform was built to highlight the incredible skills of neurodiverse individuals who are often overlooked in standard recruitment processes. Here we talk about the ‘why’ behind the platform. Why did...

Xceptional launches a platform 3-minute read It’s a special time for our team as we count down to the release of the Xceptional assessment platform for neurodiverse job seekers (https://app.xceptional.io/). Xceptional’s custom built platform allows job seekers to demonstrate their skills by completing tasks, puzzles and activities in a safe online environment. Since our inception...

Elon Musk recently shared that he is autistic. He was not the first billionaire to disclose as neurodivergent. There are others as discussed in a previous article, but most have ADHD or dyslexia rather than being autistic. There are few autistic business leaders who are household names. This has serious implications for autistic leadership.  Charlotte...

Elon Musk’s autistic disclosure earlier this month has left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I am a self-confessed space nut, having studied Physics for my undergrad degree. Yet the way his announcement was made was not ideal.   In the fargone days of international travel, I spoke at a tech conference in Cocoa Beach,...

The Benefits of Coaching: From Great to Xceptional!

One of the key elements of a successful employment program for autistic individuals is job coaching. Coaching enhances employment success by ensuring greater job satisfaction, increased productivity, and in the long term, greater employee retention. — It is widely acknowledged that increasing the diversity of workforces leads to positive outcomes. McKinsey’s Diversity Matters report has...

Why we are taking a week to slow down

This year has been a huge time of change. Our team have done an amazing job responding to Covid by transitioning our training, coaching, recruitment, assessment and events online. Our webinar last week was just one of many areas of our business that have had to quickly pivot. There has been an extraordinary growth in...

Who our training is for – and it might not be who you think

It is often assumed by people that I meet, that our training is for autistic employees rather than employers. In fact, the opposite is true. This misunderstanding is excusable. In other cases of unemployment, such as veterans or young people, up-skilling is often successful. Yet for the autistic community, they are usually over-skilled.  Instead, our...

Why now is the time to hire autistic employees

With employers turning their focus to enabling their workforce to work from home, hiring managers are faced with a new challenge of mobilising their teams, implementing new processes and managing workloads remotely. Employers may find this time of heightened change difficult to navigate, particularly the recruitment process. At Xceptional we believe there has never been...

Reflections on our Xceptional funding round

Written by: Mike Tozer, CEO & Founder. If you missed it, yesterday was a big day for Xceptional with the news of our BOLD agreement and our $600,000 funding round in the Australian and other press. I remember sitting in my class at Harvard listening to one of the guests that visited – Tracy Palandjian from Social...