In October of 2010, Lydia Wayman had her "dream job" taking care of animals at the no-kill shelter near her home in Pittsburgh, Penn. She fed and loved the critters, and got paid to do it. It wasn't a big career stepping stone for an energetic college graduate who (as she says) is “super smart,” memorizes well, loves to read, research and write, and is highly, unusually, attentive to details. But then again, Lydia is autistic, and even a shelter job, which didn’t engage the fullest range of her talents, became too much.

She started experiencing intense bouts of OCD. Weird, sometimes almost violent thoughts popped into her brain, “like they were coming from outside of me.” She became unreasonably scared of germs. She calls her condition “usually high-functioning” autism. On her best days, it's like Aspergers. On her worst days, like those in October, she might panic, hide and shut down.

Her employer did everything she could. She asked what she could to do work to get around the problems. She communicated in an open, straightforward way. But it wasn't enough. 

Since then she’s had more than a few visits to the "psych" ward at the hospital, and has been unable to look for work. “It’s kind of a conundrum,” she says. And a far more common one for people her age. Lydia is one of many autistic young adults in our Public Insight Network. She responded to questions submitted by another of our sources, Mike Carey, a vice president for global recruiting firm PDI Ninth House. The central query: What can employers do to help autistic young adults become successful? For the companies that can solve that riddle, there's a highly capable and growing pool of workers with some incredible gifts -- and some challenging deficits.

In the last 20 years, the prevalence of autism has increased 600 percent, according to the Center for Disease Control. As kids age into young adulthood, they find they can’t function as a neurotypical adult -- making it hard to find work. Lydia is part of a study of autistic adults at the University of Pittsburgh. She says most of her fellow study participants have college degrees, but work mopping floors part-time or other minimum wage jobs. Lydia worked for a spell at the local Giant Eagle grocery store in the photo department, until she got panic attacks and had to hide in the back of the store.

So here's the dilemma: On one hand, you’ve got three-quarters of a million kids with autism, many on the high-functioning end of the spectrum. The vast majority, if not every one, have some incredible gifts – be it the ability to focus on highly-detailed task for hours at hand, memorize stores of information, write with grace and skill (to wit, read Lydia's blog here), program computer games, etc. But since they have trouble reading facial expressions, parsing nonverbal communications or showing emotion, they’re often perceived as strange, wooden, non-responsive or even creepy. Not exactly a laundry list of characteristics employers are looking for, especially in this economy.

This, it seems to me, is an opportunity ripe for some good old American ingenuity. How about a Mechanical Turk-like clearinghouse for tasks that adults on the spectrum can do from their home? An autistic blogging network (not just about autism, but about everything under the sun)? There is “so much that can be done to help [autistic young adults] and they can contribute to society in so many ways,” says Nancy Briski, Lydia’s mother. Renowned autism advocate Temple Grandin often speaks and writes of the value that autistic employees can bring to companies that hire them. 

Lydia says she’s not giving up. But wherever she works next, she thinks there have to be at least three key elements:

Our hyper-connected work-anywhere age seems full of jobs that meet these criteria. Lydia says researching for a college professor seems like it could be the right gig for her. Maybe so.

“Since she is so very bright,” her mom says, “I wish for something to engage her intelligence.”