There is something slightly ridiculous about creating myself as a superhero for a series of LinkedIn posts while privately questioning whether I have anything particularly valuable to offer a business. I can stand there in a costume talking about pattern recognition, curiosity, strategic thinking and some of the strengths I associate with my autistic brain, genuinely believing every word I am writing, then another rejection arrives or another week passes without an interview and suddenly I find myself questioning whether I have simply created a flattering version of myself that nobody else seems able to see.
That contradiction probably describes where I am better than anything else at the moment. I am learning more about who I am professionally at exactly the same time as my confidence in that person is disappearing.
“I can tell you what makes me valuable and still struggle to believe that anybody wants it.”
Over the past few months, job searching has forced me to examine my career in a way I never really had before. I have had to explain what I do, what I am good at and why somebody should choose me, while trying to condense twelve+ years of experience into job titles, achievements and carefully chosen words on a CV. Somewhere in that process I realised that although I can tell you what I have done, I have always found it much harder to explain how I think, and increasingly I believe that is where much of my actual value sits.
A Career That Never Followed a Straight Line
My route into marketing was hardly conventional. At school I studied graphic design, at college it was multimedia and animation, then university took me into film and digital media. After that came retail, sales and administration before, at around twenty-seven, I finally found my way into marketing.
For a long time I looked back at everything before that point as though I had wasted years of my life because I had not found the thing I was supposed to be doing yet. The older I get, the less certain I am that those years were wasted at all.
Retail taught me about people and customers, sales taught me about commercial reality and communication, administration taught me about process and detail, while my creative education gave me an instinct for visual communication and storytelling. None of those experiences individually made me a marketer, but perhaps the combination of them explains something about the marketer I eventually became.
When I finally moved into marketing, I did not enter a large department with specialists around me who could teach me one particular discipline. I worked in smaller environments and eventually became a one-person marketing function, which meant learning whatever needed to be learned.
I touched social media, email, content, events, websites, branding, campaigns and commercial activity, sometimes learning while I was doing because there was nobody else there to pass it to. For years I saw that breadth as a strength. During this job search, I have started wondering whether it is actually the thing making me harder to place.
Good at Lots of Things, Expert at None?
The phrase that kept appearing in my head was “jack of all trades, master of none”, and I started using it almost as an explanation for why I might not be progressing.
I am not the best social media manager in the world. I am not a specialist email marketer, paid advertising expert, website developer or data analyst. There are platforms and MQL tools I have not had the opportunity to work with deeply, and there are people who have spent their entire careers developing technical expertise in individual areas where my knowledge is much broader.
The more job descriptions I read, the easier it became to turn that into a criticism of myself. Yet there is another side to it…
I have also learned over the past few years that businesses should not expect one marketer to do everything. Marketing needs brilliant specialists. It needs designers who understand design more deeply than I ever will, digital specialists who live inside their platforms, data people who can find meaning in information and channel experts who understand the details I cannot possibly know across everything.
I do not want to be all of those people anymore… I want to understand how all of those people fit together.
“Maybe my strength was never knowing everything, but understanding how everything connects.”
That realisation has helped me rethink what I originally dismissed as being a jack of all trades. Perhaps breadth does not mean I failed to specialise, perhaps it means my natural place is increasingly in the space between the specialisms, understanding what the business is trying to achieve and helping connect the people, channels and ideas needed to get there.
The Pattern Recognition I Never Thought About
Pattern recognition is one of those phrases I have seen associated with autism many times, but for years I did not really recognise it in myself because I assumed the way I thought was simply the way everybody thought… The more I reflect on my work, the more obvious it becomes.
Give me a marketing problem and I struggle to look at it in isolation. If a campaign is underperforming, my brain does not naturally stop at the advert or the email. I start thinking about the audience, the proposition, the brand, what sales are hearing, what customers actually need, what the data is telling us and whether the problem we are trying to solve is even the right problem.
One thought connects to another, which connects to something somebody mentioned three weeks ago, which connects to a number I saw somewhere else, until eventually a bigger picture starts forming.
Sometimes that is exhausting because my brain does not always know when to stop looking for connections, but professionally it is also one of the things I value most about the way I think… It is probably why strategy increasingly feels like where I belong.
I enjoy marketing activity, creativity and execution, but the part that really engages me is understanding why we are doing something. What is the business trying to achieve? What does the customer actually need? Where is the opportunity? What problem are we solving? What does success look like commercially, and how should marketing contribute to getting us there? The tactics come afterwards.
I did not always call that strategy because much of it felt instinctive. It took interview feedback around my GTM experience to make me step backwards and realise that I had been thinking strategically for years without always using the language that described it. That was strangely reassuring. I had not discovered a new ability, I had discovered a better way of recognising an ability that was already there.
Curiosity That Refuses to Stay on the Surface
My curiosity works in much the same way. When something interests me, knowing a little about it rarely feels sufficient.
Before an interview, I research the business extensively. I look at the website, social media, news coverage and employee testimonials. I read Glassdoor and look through Companies House because I want to understand what sits underneath the polished version presented to candidates.
Part of that is undoubtedly my autistic need to reduce uncertainty. Knowing more helps me feel prepared for a situation where I cannot predict everything that is going to happen. But it is not only anxiety… I genuinely enjoy understanding businesses.
“My brain rarely accepts ‘what are we doing?’ without immediately asking ‘why are we doing it?”
I want to know where they came from, what they are trying to become, what challenges they might be facing and how the different parts connect. By the time I enter an interview, I am already thinking about where I might be able to help, not because I presume to understand somebody’s business better than they do after a few hours of research, but because that curiosity is how I engage with something I care about.
The same thing happens once I am involved in a project. I want to understand the reason underneath the reason. If somebody tells me we need a campaign, part of my brain immediately wants to know why we need it, what changed, who we are trying to reach and what happens if we succeed.
That can probably make me annoying sometimes… It can also stop us solving the wrong problem.
What My Autistic Brain Brings to Marketing
I am careful with phrases like “autism is my superpower” because autism does not feel particularly super when uncertainty is consuming me, when I am replaying a conversation for the hundredth time or when changes outside my control leave me mentally exhausted.
There are parts of being autistic that are incredibly difficult for me, and describing only the positive parts would feel dishonest. At the same time, I do not want to spend my life talking about autism only through the things I struggle with.
For me, autistic strengths are not magical abilities that every autistic person shares. They are simply characteristics of the way my own brain works that, in the right environment, can become genuinely useful. Autism is individual and another autistic adult may recognise none of this in themselves, which is exactly why neurodiversity needs to be understood through people rather than stereotypes.
For me, it is the pattern recognition, the curiosity, the depth I can reach when something genuinely engages me and the drive to understand how things connect. It is the creativity that allows me to imagine something differently and the determination that makes me keep pulling at a problem until it starts making sense… It is also honesty.
I do not particularly enjoy pretending I know something when I do not. During this job search I have been very conscious that I do not want to inflate my CV or manufacture experience because I think it is what somebody wants to hear. Tell me what you want to understand and I will answer honestly. If I do not have something, I would rather say that and explain what I do have, what I can learn and how I would approach it.
Maybe that does not always make me the easiest person to sell on paper… I hope it eventually makes me somebody worth trusting.
The Role Where All of This Makes Sense
When I think about the perfect next role, I do not imagine walking into a business where everything is finished and simply maintaining what already exists. I imagine an established business at the beginning of something.
Perhaps it is growing, rebranding, entering a new market, launching something new or looking at what it has always done and asking whether there is a better way. I want to arrive at that point, understand where the business is going and help shape what happens next. That is where I think the strange collection of experiences I have accumulated starts making sense.
I want to understand the commercial goal, customer, brand and opportunity, then develop the marketing strategy around those things. I want to work with specialists who are better than me at the individual disciplines they own, give them the context and freedom they need to be brilliant and help connect their work into something bigger.
I want to build… Not because I believe I have all the answers, but because I genuinely enjoy finding them with other people.
There is a leadership element to that which I understand more now too. Earlier in my career I thought progressing meant becoming increasingly capable of doing everything myself. Experience has taught me almost the opposite. Leadership is not proving you can personally execute every part of a function, it is understanding what the function needs, finding people with the right strengths and creating the conditions where those strengths work together…That is the marketer I am trying to become. The frustrating part is that I need somebody to see enough of that potential in the marketer I already am to give me the opportunity.
When Knowing Your Strengths Does Not Create Confidence
This is where all of the positive reflection becomes complicated because I can write everything above and mean it, then still question whether any of it is particularly special.
Maybe everybody in marketing recognises patterns. Maybe every good marketer thinks strategically. Maybe curiosity is simply part of the job. Maybe the things I associate with the way my autistic brain works are not different enough to matter… Repeated rejection has a strange ability to turn strengths into questions.
I have spent over twelve years building experience that should give me confidence, yet a few months without work has been enough to make me question whether I understood my own career at all. I can receive reassurance from people I respect, look at projects I know delivered genuine value and articulate more clearly than ever where I want my career to go, then another application disappears and suddenly I am back wondering whether I am imagining all of it.
That is why the superhero posts I have been creating feel more personal than they probably appear. They are playful and I genuinely enjoy making them, but underneath the costume and checked trousers there is somebody trying to remind himself that being different does not automatically mean being less valuable.
“I can celebrate the way my autistic brain works publicly and still sit at home privately wondering whether I am good enough.”
Perhaps that contradiction is important because conversations around neurodiversity sometimes become too neat. We talk about strengths or challenges as though autistic people have to choose which story describes them.
My autism can make prolonged uncertainty incredibly difficult while also making me determined to find clarity. It can make my brain replay something long after I want to let it go while also helping me notice patterns other people might move past. The depth with which I can become absorbed in something can exhaust me, but when that something has purpose, the same intensity can become passion, curiosity and drive. Those things do not cancel each other out… They are simply different sides of the same brain.
Research into autistic employment increasingly emphasises that autistic people are diverse and that workplace outcomes depend not simply on individual characteristics but on whether environments recognise and support different ways of working. Research into hiring processes has similarly found that autistic adults can experience barriers before they ever reach the workplace, which matters because organisations cannot benefit from different thinking if the people who think differently never make it through the door.
Still Learning to Believe the Person I Describe
I would love to finish this article by saying that understanding all of this has restored my confidence… It has not.
I am still searching for work, still struggling with my mental health and still finding it difficult to get excited about opportunities because I am frightened of what happens when I allow myself to hope. I still have moments where I question whether years of experience means what I thought it meant, whether I am senior enough for the roles I want and whether another business will ever see the value I am trying so hard to articulate.
What has changed slightly is that I understand the question better. I am not trying to become the best specialist in every area of marketing because that is not who I am and increasingly it is not who I want to be. I want to be the person who sees how those areas connect, who understands enough to ask the right questions, who brings talented people together around a strategy and who gets genuinely excited about helping a business evolve.
I know that now… Believing somebody else will want it is the part I am still working on.
Perhaps confidence does not return in one dramatic moment. Maybe, for now, it is simply continuing to describe myself honestly even when the voice in my head questions every word, continuing to apply for roles that actually fit the person I have become and refusing to turn being different into evidence that I am somehow less.
I do not know which business will eventually give me the opportunity to prove any of this, and pretending I am certain everything will work out would not be honest. What I do know is that underneath months of rejection, uncertainty and self-doubt there is still a marketer who wants to understand, build, connect, challenge, create and help take something somewhere new, and perhaps learning to recognise the value in that person is another part of learning to understand autism through my eyes.
References and Further Reading
Davies et al. (2023), Access to employment: A comparison of autistic, neurodivergent and neurotypical adults’ experiences of hiring processes in the United Kingdom
UCL Discovery
Maras et al. (2021), Ameliorating the disadvantage for autistic job seekers: An initial evaluation of adapted employment interview questions
University of Bath research record
National Autistic Society, Deciding whether to tell employers you are autistic
National Autistic Society