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Flourishing at work with reasonable adjustments: autistic co-trainer journey on The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training

The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism has been co-produced and is now co-delivered by trainers with lived experience of learning disability and autism, who are paid for their time.

Oliver’s Training not only provides equal opportunities and tackles economic inequality by opening doors to employment, but it is also a path for personal fulfilment and growth.

In this insightful interview, we understand the employee experience of Lauren Saunders-Love, a passionate autistic co-trainer changing the culture in health and care for people with a learning disability and autistic people through Oliver’s Training.

Lauren is part of a trio of approved trainers who deliver the Tier 1, hour-long, online, interactive training session in Bedfordshire for The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training. Lauren takes the role of an autistic co-trainer and works alongside a co-trainer with a learning disability as well as a facilitating trainer.

In the training session, the co-trainers describe their lived experiences, bust common myths, and explain how reasonable adjustments and communication can make health and care services more accessible and safer for all.

I’ve gained confidence speaking in front of other people. Until a few months ago I would have had very little.”

Can you tell us about the jobs you had before you became an approved autistic co-trainer for Oliver’s Training?

Before working for Autism Bedfordshire I had only had short-term, freelance jobs and had not been able to secure work with regular hours that was suitable for me.

I have very limited ability to travel and use public transport, which has been a huge barrier to employment, therefore being permitted to work from home has helped me enormously. I live in a small town where most of the available jobs are customer-facing, including the often busy, fast-paced environment of retail and the service industries. With lots of people and sounds, they are simply settings I cannot cope in.

Now in the co-trainer role, I am really enjoying working and delivering Oliver’s Training, as I can draw on my own lived experience to educate NHS staff and help improve their services. I find this very rewarding as in most other situations my Asperger’s* and learning difficulties make certain aspects of life more challenging for me.

How has the team at Autism Bedfordshire facilitated your introduction to your co-trainer role?  

I find uncertainty distressing, especially when I cannot plan, fortunately this need has been respected by my facilitating trainer, who from the beginning has been willing to answer my many questions. Additionally, if I don’t understand how she has explained something in an email, she is more than happy to explain it in a different format, for instance on a call using Microsoft Teams.

I have found the gradual approach to increasing my working hours to be beneficial emotionally. As I am not used to longer work hours, this approach has prevented me from becoming stressed and overwhelmed.

My facilitating trainer ensured that were was plenty of time to practise the webinar, which I was very concerned about. My fellow co-trainers have been really supportive and have been willing to do extra practice with me outside of our team meetings. I’ve gained confidence speaking in front of other people. Until a few months ago I would have had very little.

What other adjustments and support has the team put in place to help you deliver Oliver’s Training?

Having access to the lived experience questions prior to the webinar allows me to plan answers to the questions so that I do not feel put on the spot. If I couldn’t view the questions beforehand, I would struggle to explain in detail the impact my Asperger’s* and learning difficulties have on me, as my processing delay would prevent me from fully understanding and interpreting the questions in time.

My dyscalculia makes it very difficult for me to manage and to keep track of time, though having my facilitating trainer present during webinars supports me and allows me to focus on delivering.

The audience having their cameras off for the first section prevents me from being distracted by people’s facial expressions, which I may misinterpret, and could cause me to lose confidence in what I am speaking about.

I am supported with the audience participation, although I enjoy discussing what people have shared, if I were expected to respond to all of it, I would find this overwhelming, as I want to give everyone an equal amount of time, but this isn’t always possible.

My processing delay also means I take much longer to read text and answer questions, therefore having my facilitating trainer read out the responses, enables me to think about my answers and means we can get through the section more efficiently.

What has been your biggest achievement in this role so far?

I have started to deliver two Tier 1 webinars a week, though this may not sound like much to someone neurotypical, this is a significant achievement for me. When I started, I was very worried and concerned about being able to deliver the webinars fluently. Over the last few months my confidence has grown considerably, and I am more comfortable answering questions from the audience and generally interacting with them.

Despite this new-found confidence I still find delivering webinars very tiring, but the gradual build up has helped me manage this.

Do you have any advice for people who are considering or have recently started the co-trainer role?

The first time I got in contact with Autism Bedfordshire, I withdrew my interest from the co-trainer role, as I did not perceive myself as being capable enough. I am not a confident person and so never imagined that I would be able to speak in front of a group of total strangers.

To anyone considering applying, you aren’t thrown in the deep end, and you won’t be expected to start delivering webinars immediately. When I started, I and the rest of the team spent a couple of months just practising the webinar in partners. A worry I initially had was that I would be expected to speak in front of people independently, this is not the case, you are always accompanied by a facilitating trainer and another co-trainer. It’s always worth remembering that if we don’t tell “neurotypicals” what it’s like, then they’ll never know.

To those who’ve just started, remember that no one was 100% confident at first. Even those experienced at delivering webinars still face anxiety, they just might have got better at managing it. When delivering webinars think about how you’d want to hear the information if you were receiving the training yourself; for instance, I speak slowly so that people can understand and don’t become overloaded.

At NHS England, we want to thank Lauren and the team at Autism Bedfordshire for their commitment to Oliver’s Training and being a voice for those who are not always heard.

If you’re interested in becoming a co-trainer like Lauren, visit the  express an interest webpage .

To find out more about more about how to involve people with lived experience in The Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism, visit the employer resource webpage .

*Aspergers is a term that is not used diagnostically anymore, however Lauren prefers to use this term to describe herself.

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Microsoft customers complain Copilot doesn't work as well as ChatGPT. Microsoft says they're not using it right.

• A top complaint from Microsoft's customers is that Copilot doesn't perform as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
• Microsoft says customers aren't using its new artificial-intelligence tools properly.
• The company is paying a partner to produce videos to teach customers how to write better prompts.

One of the top customer complaints about Microsoft 's Copilot is that it doesn't seem to work as well as ChatGPT , according to employees with direct knowledge of customer feedback.

"Every time a customer starts using it, they start comparing it to ChatGPT and saying, 'Aren't you guys using the same technology?'" one of the people said.

ChatGPT, OpenAI 's artificial-intelligence chatbot, has set relatively high expectations for customers who are now trying out Microsoft Copilot tools for the first time. The software giant's efforts to meet those expectations is an important test as the AI industry attempts to switch users from free consumer chatbot offerings to something more valuable.

Microsoft is racing to add value to these AI tools before customers start asking whether they're getting a proper return from the extra money they're spending on this much-hyped technology.

Copilot vs. ChatGPT

Copilot for Microsoft 365 has reached the most customers so far after the company made it generally available in November. This is a version of the AI assistant that works alongside the company's suite of business applications such as Word, Outlook, and Teams.

Feedback for the tool has been mixed to leaning positive so far, according to the Microsoft employees who spoke with BI.

There are the usual Microsoft problems: Some customers are using older versions of products such as the Outlook email service, and they expect whizbang AI Copilot capabilities to work with this somewhat aging software.

But Microsoft employees told BI the comparisons with ChatGPT kept coming up. These sources asked not to be identified discussing private matters.

The "work" version of the Copilot tool uses internal customer data to help provide automated support to employees working on tasks such as summarizing meetings.

It queries this sensitive information from sources including Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software. This sometimes means responses aren't as quick or thorough as a free and open web-based chatbot such as ChatGPT that's been trained on information from the entire internet.

Microsoft employees told BI that customers who were saying this Copilot tool didn't compare favorably with ChatGPT just didn't understand how the different products work.

This was confirmed by Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI at work, in an interview arranged by the company.

Microsoft's Copilot tools are built on what the company calls the Azure OpenAI model. This takes OpenAI's top GPT models and adds additional capabilities.

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These GPT models provide a broad foundation of knowledge. Copilots essentially sit on top of this and tap private customer data to provide bespoke support in specific work situations. The system naturally has more restrictions, according to Microsoft employees. For instance, it only temporarily accesses internal data and then deletes it after each query.

Teaching customers how to prompt

Another problem for Microsoft is that users are typically bad at writing prompts, the employees say. These are special instructions that get the most out of AI models and chatbots. There's even a new job for this emerging skill, known as prompt engineering .

"It's a copilot, not an autopilot, you have to work with it," one Microsoft staffer told BI.

The answer an AI tool gives can only be as good as the question asked. "If you don't ask the right question, it will still do its best to give you the right answer, and it can assume things," this person added.

One of the employees said Microsoft had hired its partner BrainStorm to create training videos to help customers create better prompts for Copilot. Microsoft and BrainStorm declined to comment on this.

Some Microsoft customers have even created their own internal teams to help train staff on how to make the best use of these AI tools.

Spataro said Microsoft had put a lot of work into providing support for prompt engineering within the Copilot for Microsoft 365 product itself, such as with FAQs and prompt examples.

'Work' Copilot vs. 'web' Copilot

A source of customer confusion is that there's a "work" version of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and a "web" version of the tool.

The web-based version generates similar outputs to ChatGPT and runs in a similar way. Meanwhile, the "work" version is the one that uses internal private customer data to provide more bespoke and specific responses.

For instance, a Microsoft customer may use the web version of Copilot to search publicly available information about a client. Then they could switch to the work version to find out what extra information is available about this client from internal corporate data.

Still, employees told BI that customers were getting confused about why the "work" version wasn't giving responses as quickly or as thoroughly as the web-based Copilot.

Spataro said Microsoft had been taking measures to help customers understand how these different Copilot offerings operate. For instance, the company is introducing a toggle switch so customers can swap between the "web" and the "work" version of Copilot to help them understand which dataset — the web or their internal files stored within SharePoint — is being queried.

"Copilot for Microsoft 365 is unlike any other AI experience at work, with a deep understanding of your job and organization that combines top of the line AI models, the web, and your business data to enable new scenarios that directly impact the bottom line in a way that wasn't possible before generative AI," Spataro said in a statement.

Are you a Microsoft employee or someone else with insight to share?

Contact Ashley Stewart via email ( [email protected] ), or send a secure message from a non-work device via Signal (+1-425-344-8242).

Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.

Watch: What is ChatGPT, and should we be afraid of AI chatbots?

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