The drafters at Australian Spatial Analytics are delivering high-quality results for major Australian critical infrastructure projects and demonstrating the value of unexpected sources of talent.
According to the Australian Autism Alliance, the unemployment rate for autistic people in Australia is 34.1 per cent – three times the average rate for people with other disabilities and eight times the national average.
“It shouldn’t be that way,” is how Geoff Smith, CEO of Australian Spatial Analytics (ASA), a leading social enterprise that provides geospatial and engineering data services, responded when he first came across that figure.
Among the causes for that high unemployment rate are barriers to work in the recruitment process, including a lack of qualifications. With ASA, founded as a social enterprise – think a business solution to a social problem – Smith saw a way to create career pathways for talented people who are often left out of the employment market.
“The majority of our workforce are young autistic people who are trained on the job by us to deliver work without any prior experience before starting,” he said.
“We deliver digital engineering, geospatial, data management and document control services to large infrastructure projects, including utilities, asset managers and state governments. This kind of work has traditionally been offshored to the tune of one billion dollars a year, and we’re bringing it back to Australia.”
ASA’s commitment to neurodiversity is part of its work as a registered charity – as a not-for-profit business, every dollar the company makes is invested into supporting an autistic person learn and work – but Smith describes its workforce as a competitive advantage.
“The neurodiversity on our team results in lateral thinking; they have better pattern recognition and memory retention and can be faster and more precise,” he said.
“These skills are critical to the type of work we do and the clients that we work for, and we find that our team is better at picking things up on the job. It’s almost like a technical trade skill rather than requiring them to attain the right certificates or qualifications.”
And ASA has the numbers to back up its approach. Over the company’s five years of existence, it has delivered $30 million worth of projects to clients, including Tier 1 contractors such as the John Holland Group, Brisbane Airport and all levels of government.
“We’ve got offices in Brisbane and in Melbourne and now we’re looking to expand again,” Smith said.
“We’ve employed more than 270 people and 80 per cent of those are neurodivergent young adults under 30, many of whom are in their first-ever jobs and learning the projects for the first time.”
The right platform
According to Samuel Anderson, ASA’s Program Manager for Digital Engineering, ASA’s use of construction collaboration and management software platform Bluebeam is a key means by which ASA has enabled neurodivergent drafters to deliver this high-quality geospatial and engineering work.
“It really helps reduce the barriers to entry, enabling us to translate concepts or explain different ideas in ways that can benefit not only people with autism or ADHD, but dyslexia or dyspraxia as well,” he said.
“Bluebeam is a core tool that helps us to deliver consistent, high-quality outputs across these projects. It’s something that we’ve used to apply consistent communication for a cohort that doesn’t initially have the full suite of experience to interpret it.”
For instance, Anderson said, Bluebeam had helped the ASA team rapidly acclimate itself to the details of its work with infrastructure services provider Ventia, ensuring common understanding across the team as well as the client.
“We quickly learned what Ventia wanted us to do as well as the technology behind it. This enabled us to not only do as-built works for Australia’s fibreoptic cable rollout, but the design stages as well,” he said.
“Bluebeam helped to communicate changes and enable people without a specific technical background to develop their skills in such a way so they could make informed decisions faster than those with a bit more experience.”
The collaboration would turn out to be so successful that Ventia made employment offers to three of ASA’s workers.
“That is a perfect outcome for us, because it enables us to backfill and hire more neurodivergent people who are underemployed or long-term unemployed, and train them up,” Anderson said.
New talent
By leveraging Bluebeam this way, ASA has been able to rapidly train team members, maintain quality assurance, and scale delivery across multiple projects and clients.
“When we take new employees on, they may not have any prior industry experience, but with Bluebeam, we can still give them structured markups to go through with clear instructions and supporting information that enables them to contribute very early on,” Anderson said.
“With Bluebeam, it takes very little time compared to other software for us to get people in the door and contribute to a project.”
This standardised markup system, along with other Bluebeam capabilities, such as real-time collaboration, document control, and workflow efficiency, helps ASA improve the scalability, accuracy, and consistency of its project data workflows.
“We have many clients who use Bluebeam as well, and that common understanding when we’re using collaborative features leads to a lot more consistency. They might not have specific authorising software, but they will have Bluebeam.”
For Smith, the lesson of his journey with ASA is that businesses should cast a wider net when they’re looking to hire new talent.
“There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the engineering skills shortage,” he said.
“But it is unbelievable how quickly our team could pick up products and understand context quickly. If you look down alternative pathways, you can find great people who can work with these tools to deliver great projects.”
Thanks for featuring us Bluebeam and Engineers Australia!