A prestigious business summit featured a case study on CMT Engineering: how we embraced a programme to help people with autism into long-term employment, and took on our wonderful employee Sam Green.

Sam came to us in 2021 through Sandwell Council’s Supported Employment programme. This scheme matches employers with job-seekers who, due to autism or a learning disability, struggle to find work through traditional routes.

They did this alongside Kate Loftus and Sam Crabtree from Supported Employment. 

At Sandwell Council’s inaugural Business Growth and Employment Summit at The Hawthorns in November, CMT’s Anjali Agrawal and Jon Smout were invited to share our story of welcoming Sam into the CMT Engineering family.

Complex barriers to employment  

To a room packed with more than a hundred businesspeople, Kate explained what Supported Employment is and the challenges it helps to overcome.

Most adults and young people want to work, Kate said, but those with autism or a learning disability often experience complex barriers to finding employment. The barriers include poor access to work experience, and rigid recruitment practices that place too much emphasis on being ‘work ready’.

‘Often people with disabilities go through endless streams of employability courses and […] preparation for employment,’ Kate said. ‘But actually learning on the job, in the workplace, is what needs to happen.’ 

And that’s what Supported Employment facilitates.

Kate met our CEO Anjali in 2020 through the Sandwell Business Ambassadors – of which Anjali is a member. Kate had delivered an online talk to the Ambassadors on the benefits of diversifying workforces through Supported Employment, and Anjali expressed an interest.

CMT Engineering had already successfully engaged with Sandwell Council on another employment scheme, offering a role to someone who had been unemployed for twenty years, and who is still with us. So this felt like a natural step for us to take.

Taster placements

Meanwhile, Sam Green – who has autism – had been doing taster placements through Supported Employment in supermarket and office settings. He’d found them frustrating due to inconsistencies and interruptions within his workflow.

Realising Sam would thrive doing predictable tasks, job coach Sam Crabtree worked with our Operations and Procurement Manager Jon to identify a role at CMT Engineering that would be more suitable. It involved machine operation, with little variation from day to day.

Sam Green had an informal interview with us, and looked around our premises to see what the job entailed and whether it was right for him. This was a chance for CMT to see whether Sam was right for us too.

‘We had to check whether the environment was OK for Sam. It’s a noisy environment, you get your hands dirty, you have to wear overalls – and that’s not for everyone,’ said Sam Crabtree. ‘But Sam was fine with that.’

‘He got to know the tasks and picked it all up relatively quickly.’

That was three years ago – and we are delighted to still have Sam on our team today. He works at CMT on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the days he chose when we offered the job to him.

Minor adjustments

We have made minor adjustments to make Sam’s life happier at work. These include switching off the radio, because the news segments can be triggering, and holding Sam’s appraisals on the factory floor where he feels comfortable. Because Sam struggled with break times, due to people coming in and out of the canteen area, he now takes his breaks in Jon’s office.

‘So he has thirty minutes in the quiet,’ said Jon. ‘If he wants to talk, he talks, if he doesn’t, he’s fine – he just says ta-ra and goes back to work. Really those are the only little bits and pieces we’ve had to change – a few tweaks, just as we would make for everyone else.’

‘He’s fitted in and he does a cracking job.’

‘We believe in having a diverse team’

Anjali explained why CMT Engineering decided to engage with Supported Employment.

‘We are very grateful about what we have been able to achieve in Sandwell, so we wanted to give back.’ She pointed out that anyone could have a learning disability. ‘We are all in this life together. We have to support one another’.  

Anjali added that there were huge benefits to CMT in employing Sam. ‘We believe in having a diverse team and CMT is diverse in terms of age, race, gender, disability. Sam Green brings a lot of joy to our colleagues – they support him and they like him.’

Both Kate and Anjali were keen to emphasise that Supported Employment is not a charitable scheme. ‘It’s about the jobseeker being able to contribute to the business’, Kate said. Anjali reiterated the mutual benefits for both employee and employer:

‘This isn’t us doing Sam a “favour”. Sam earns every pound that he gets at CMT Engineering. He’s a very valuable employee’.

‘The job suits me’

We think the last word on this should of course go to Sam, who said: 

‘The job suits me as I can do a task that is consistent without lots of change. Other tasks have been added to my role over time and I can move from one machine to another now.’