How Amazon and AWS continue to build equitable opportunities for neurodivergent talent

As a person with autism, Amazon Web Services (AWS) builder Karie Adair has found that working remotely helps her manage the sensory overload she sometimes experiences during the work day. She onboarded during the pandemic when remote-work became more common across AWS, and she’s especially grateful to continue working virtually as the company lets directors decide when and how often their teams should come into the office.

“It allows me to manage what's hitting me and filter things out in a way that lets me function at a capable and steady pace, without feeling too dramatically overwhelmed,” Adair said. “It’s been a really fantastic experience for managing how comfortable I am going about my work.”

Adair, a technical editor on the AWS Documentation team, led an internal presentation for AWS and Amazon employees on “How to be a leader for an autistic team member.” The event was one of dozens of presentations, trainings, and roundtable discussions held across the company in honor of Amazon’s Neurodiversity and Autism Acceptance Month (NAAM) in April and Global Accessibility Awareness Month (GAAM) in May.

These programs encourage Amazonians to learn about accessibility, diversity, inclusion, and equity. And while the calendar of workshops, trainings, podcasts, live broadcasts, and other events are packed for these awareness and acceptance occasions, these events are becoming the norm throughout the rest of the year, too.

“Before coming to AWS, I worked in a much more conservative business environment and we didn’t have any resources like this,” Adair said. “I had no idea just how many of my coworkers at that company were neurodivergent or autistic. I had no idea there even were accommodations for people like me to help me work more effectively so that I can progress in my career as skillfully as my neurotypical colleagues.”

Since 2016, Bettina Thompson—a diversity program manager for Amazon’s Consumer Talent Acquisition organization—has tirelessly developed Neurodiversity at Amazon. As a member of the global board of directors for Amazon’s People with Disabilities (PWD) Affinity Group, Thompson also serves as director of recruiting and co-director of neurodiversity.  

With the knowledge that individuals with spectrum conditions already were employed at Amazon, Thompson has led efforts to create a sense of community and provide tools and resources that raise awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity across Amazon and AWS. It started with a half-day neurodiversity summit in 2020, and less than 18 months later, she celebrated a jam-packed 2022 NAAM.  

Under the theme “Inclusion in the Workplace,” Thompson and fellow neurodiversity co-director Naomi Johnson organized more than 40 live-streamed events across three global regions—North America, the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA), and India—including an Amazon Fishbowl event and five sessions of a new series called “Thinking Differently at Amazon” that provides a platform for neurodivergent Amazonians to share personal journeys and insights.

“We have to be responsible and accountable in how we’re not just creating job opportunities, but long-term career development opportunities,” Thompson said.

With an unemployment rate estimated to be as high as 85%, but possessing unique strengths that Harvard Business Review calls a competitive advantage, the inclusion of neurodiverse talent within the workforce offers a real opportunity for organizations seeking new talent pipelines.

The active Neurodiversity Community at Amazon and AWS currently consists of about 5,000 members, inclusive of allies, advocates, and those who identify as neurodivergent. Internal Neurodiversity at Amazon channels offer safe spaces where members can share experiences and connect with each other.  

“At the core of this movement is the goal to raise awareness and acceptance that individuals with differences in brain function and behavioral traits are part of normal variation in the human population,” Johnson said, “and to uncover the strengths of neurodiverse individuals and support their talents to increase innovation and productivity of our society as a whole.”

These groups and events affirm the value of neurodivergent Amazonians with learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and other spectrum conditions, each of whom can offer powerful benefits to many areas of science, innovation, the creative arts, and more.

The Neurodiversity at Amazon Community also provides resources and tools to support the strengths and unique needs of neurodiverse employees. This includes guiding managers to ask employees how AWS and Amazon can best support them, and helping managers understand how to request accommodations and engage in communication styles that work best for the individual. The community also helps managers stay informed about available Amazon resources such as the Employee Assistance Program (three free counseling sessions per year for all employees), the Work Wellness Coaching Program which offers manager and employee support, facilitated trainings, accommodation requests, relevant employee affinity groups, and links to many external resources.

There’s a common saying around neurodiverse communities: “If you’ve met one neurodiverse person, you’ve met one neurodiverse person.”

Due to differing diagnoses and co-occurring conditions, people with spectrum conditions have unique profiles with wide-ranging symptoms, abilities, and needs.

“People often incorrectly view autism as one extreme or the other,” said Erin Chapman, a software development engineer II on the AWS Cryptographic Computing team who has autism spectrum condition. “There are lots of non-verbal autistics who are very smart people. Most people are somewhere in the middle and autism almost never looks the same person to person.”

Chapman points out that a lot of job interview questions are targeted toward neurotypical individuals, particularly behavioral questions like “tell me about a time when…” She explains how a question like “tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone” would be challenging to answer.

“I’ll think, ‘Are we thinking when I was a kid in school? A time when I was a target or I targeted someone else? Is this a physical conflict, a planning conflict, a technical conflict? What part of the conflict do they want to know about? How much backstory do they want?’” Chapman said. “I’ll typically give more detail than someone is actually looking for by providing lots of background and surrounding context of the situation. With that, I may also end up answer the wrong question because my train of thought went off for so long that my auditory center forgot what the question was.”

Because Chapman knows this about herself, when she interviewed with AWS she asked for a document to be shared during the interview, as well as an online chat, so the questions could be written out for her reference. The candidate accommodations team also suggested longer times for each interview and splitting the interviews up across two days.

She said it was also easy to get workplace accommodations once she joined. Just one month into her role, Chapman said AWS was already the most supportive place she’s ever worked.

“The employee accommodations manager thought about travel options for my service dog that I hadn’t thought of. It was actually a real, interactive process for once where the company wanted to participate in figuring out what would work,” Chapman said. “My manager did online training about working with neurodiverse individuals and has purchased a book to read as well. He’s been entirely accepting, supported me when I explained my autism to the team, and checked in afterward to make sure I felt comfortable with everyone’s reactions and made sure I know we have an always-open, two-way dialogue about how things are going.”

The AWS inclusion, diversity, and equity human resources team in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) is working to make these very experiences consistent across the board, starting with the candidate journey. They’ve been piloting a program to expand supports for People with Autism (PwA) and create an AWS autism inclusion strategy.

The program is part of a neurodiversity initiative that aims to create a truly diverse and inclusive organization, remove workforce barriers for PwA, improve innovation to ensure products and services that go to market are inclusive, and close the disability employment gap in alignment with government initiatives.

Phase 1 of the pilot kicked off in late 2021 to provide autism education and develop leader capabilities to support neurodivergent employees. Phase 2, currently underway, includes gathering feedback from builders, inclusion ambassadors, and other stakeholders in EMEA to inform the region’s first neurodivergent inclusion strategy.

Just one year into her tenure at AWS, Adair is experiencing a sense of freedom that she hasn’t felt in previous work environments. But she also recognizes that not every AWS employee on the autism spectrum has the same experience, which is why she’s motivated to speak up and share her stories in forums such as the NAAM and GAAM events.

“Finding myself in this environment has been extraordinary. It helped me feel more open and honest about being autistic myself and not feeling like I was going to be judged or looked at differently by my peers,” she said.

Adair said it takes a combination of top-down corporate initiatives combined with grassroots employee efforts, both of which she said are growing with encouraging momentum.

“That’s one of the great things about our affinity groups—you don’t have to feel like you’re all alone,” Adair said. “Sometimes you need that advocate to reiterate that this person needs accommodations to be successful. Take me as a case study: when you give an autistic person the right accommodations, they will be significantly more successful than they would have been without them.”

David Barak, an AWS network development engineer, found out he was on the autism spectrum in his 40s. The diagnosis helped explain a lot about the challenges he became accustomed to throughout his life. He recalls growing up feeling like a square peg in a society of round holes, but always chalked it up to being a “nerd.”

He’s since discovered the accommodations that help him function most successfully at work.

And case in point that no two autistic people are the same, unlike Adair, Barak has found remote work to be more challenging. He typically reads people’s body language to be sure of their responses. When people don’t turn their cameras on during calls, he said it’s hard to gauge when someone is finished speaking or when the next person is about to speak.

Similar to Chapman, Barak appreciates specificity. He said he has no problem handling ambiguity in his work tasks or managing his job expectations, but it can be hard for him when feedback about his work is generalized.

“If I’m getting feedback about my personal behavior or my interactions, the most useful thing I would tell managers of neurodiverse employees is to be more specific than they might have typically been. When you’re giving guidance, think about whether that guidance is actionable,” Barak said. “The more specific it is, the more I can learn from it and do it differently the next time.”

 

As understanding the value of the neurodiverse perspective grows, the demand for hiring more neurodivergent talent continues to increase. In true Amazon fashion, Thompson worked backwards to ensure that the education, resources, tools, mechanisms, and a healthy neurodiversity community were in place to support new hires identifying as neurodivergent. These foundational efforts have culminated in The STAR Program that employs a customer-obsessed approach for talent on the spectrum to allow them to find equitable employment at Amazon and AWS, career growth opportunities, and support from informed leaders and colleagues.

Launched in June 2022, The STAR (Spectrum Talent Acquisition and Representation) Program aims to empower all of Amazon and AWS to support talent identifying as Neurodiverse. STAR embodies the urgency to drive inclusion and innovation for the health of teams across Amazon and the benefit of our customers.

STAR is structured with scalability in mind. In early 2023, the STAR program will deliver a playbook of best practices for neurodiversity talent acquisition for use by teams across all of Amazon and AWS globally.

“STAR will create the North Star, enabling all of Amazon to implement thoughtful Neurodiversity hiring programs that go beyond reducing friction during hiring,” Thompson said. “To also guiding managers and teams to support neurodivergent individuals in achieving career growth and a sense of belonging at Amazon at AWS.”

Neurodivergent individuals are wired to think out of the box, and are gifted in skills that are often essential for success in the tech industry. By encouraging and supporting Neurodiversity, Amazon can reap huge benefits in terms of innovation, creativity and diversity of thoughts. This will also have a positive impact on Neurotypical employees by enabling them to grow and develop in varied ways.

Learn more about working at AWS, our inclusion, diversity & equity efforts, or search open roles.