Which job sectors do people work in ?

My natural talents lead me towards the technical and information technology, but I have never had what might be called a "career". Holding down a job long term has so far proved impossible - I have always been floored by severe burn-outs eventually. Since entering the job market, I've worked as...

• Store assistant in a DIY/Gardening store. I find being in a store overwhelming enough when shopping there, so eight hours straight of it was totally overwhelming and exhausting! Thankfully, it was only for one summer while waiting to go to University.
• Drawing schematic diagrams for microchip designs. I absolutely loved doing this, but it was only a temporary summer job. The work I was doing has long been superceded by software that can generate the diagrams more or less automatically.
• Customer service and clerical work in, of all places, the local Job Centre. This was utter hell. Customer service work is hard enough for me, but as you can imagine, it was extremely confrontational at times, and I had several melt-downs on the shop floor. The kafkaesque bureaucracy drove me nuts, too. I was made redundant after a few years on health grounds (their occupational health consultant made the bizarre psuedo-diagnosis of "Jesus Syndrome"!)
• Working as a lab technician in an upper school. I really enjoyed this; there were loads of cool gadgets to play with, and I generally found teachers to be easy colleagues to work with. Unfortunately for me, I was covering maternity leave, so was only there for one school year.
• Electronic and mechanical assembly and machine operator. I really liked this too, and had a line manager who just had an instinctive feel for how to get the best out of me. This led onto...
• Computer Aided Design, machine tool programming, some other software programming. My first ever promotion! My IT and design skills had been noted while I was working as an assembly technician, and I was promoted to the research and design department. It was a disaster! The work itself, I loved, but I couldn't handle juggling multiple projects, constant interruptions for meetings, negotiating project priorities, and team dynamics. Severe burnout eventually led to abysmal performance and resignation.

I didn't have any idea that I was autistic during any of these jobs - I was referred and diagnosed shortly after the last one of them ended. If I had known earlier what I know now, I would have politely refused the promotion at the electronics company and carried on the assembly and machine operating work. I always enjoyed that work, and the "sausage machine" linear way that jobs were done suited my hyper-focus and poor multi-tasking very well. I also had colleagues there that I got on with easily, and the work required too much concentration for there to be much chatting and gossiping. The company was actually pretty forward thinking in terms of staff care and open minded about staff with disabilities, of which there were a few. But I had no idea what my disability was, and little idea what kind of adjustments might have helped . Unfortunately, my diagnosis came a few years too late to save what has definitely been my best chance of stable, long-term employment.

ditto Trogluddite, my working history is similar to yours and now I refuse to get a job. At my first appointment at the job centre they had to bring the manager over to calm me down when I thought they were telling me I had to look for a job!!! I’m now working on looking after myself and learning all about me, post recent diagnosis, while slowly building my own business because it’s simply not possible for me to fit happily into any working environment/situation other than working for myself and even with that, I’m heading more and more to less and less contact with people as part of it. 

ditto Trogluddite, my working history is similar to yours and now I refuse to get a job. At my first appointment at the job centre they had to bring the manager over to calm me down when I thought they were telling me I had to look for a job!!! I’m now working on looking after myself and learning all about me, post recent diagnosis, while slowly building my own business because it’s simply not possible for me to fit happily into any working environment/situation other than working for myself and even with that, I’m heading more and more to less and less contact with people as part of it.