Brett Barker
Brett is an educator to his core, and has never really wanted to be anything else. He was raised by a Utah Golden Apple Teacher award winning single mother starting her career in the education world, and almost daily found himself in her elementary school after hours while she was working on grading papers. He used this time to explore the ancient building, but more importantly to explore the library and science labs! Every day he would find something to learn, because that is what help calm him. As someone on the Autism Spectrum, Brett deals with a lot of anxiety and noise in his brain, but found that learning new things and understanding the world around him better helped quiet the noise some. As he has grown, he found himself almost always with a focus on educating people around him, and he later shared with our team that he figures if understanding how the world works calms down his anxious mind, chances are other people will be able to feel that too, and that is all he wants to do, help other people feel more calm and safe in their lives.
Brett has spent most of his career in the tech world, starting in tech support with the original Iphone in the 90s (Yes, it's real, look it up) and shortly after moved into the software Quality Assurance industry. While in a role in an organization, he made the "mistake" of continuing to provide suggestions on how things can be done better, but unlike most team members that were just complaining Brett used his ridiculous pattern recognition skills and was able to make a suggestion, point out why the problem is happening that way, and why his suggestion was likely to give a better outcome. And as punishment for he efforts, they promoted him and told him to keep fixing things.
During this time Brett was focused on the hiring and training processes for his entire department, and was able to implement an onboarding process for specific roles that reduced the time between when an employee starts working and when they are providing real value to the organization from 3 months to 3 weeks.
Shortly after reaching this goal, Brett was sought out by Utah Valley University to create a program to help job seekers skill up for specific roles. Brett created a 8 week program with a focus on software testing with the goal of every student being able to demonstrate the ability to find real defects, log them properly, and report them to the correct people. In the first two years of running the program the placement rate for graduates was always >80%
Brett was later asked to move from his Operations Manager role to become a Senior Learning and Development Specialist for the organization he was working with, and shifted his focus to developing the entire organization instead of just one department.
During his time in this role Brett was the lead in creating dozens of custom training workshops, designed and ran multiple monthly learning events, and developed a training program to helping managers be able to give the same onboarding structure Brett found valuable in his previous roles. A key experience in this time was becoming a certified instructor for Crucial Conversations, and being able to regularly train and coach the different leadership teams in the organization on these skills. Brett spent almost 10 years in this role as an educator and coach, helping executives understand their roles while supporting interns who have never worked in an office setting. The company also had Brett get a LSS Green Belt certification to support his ability to develop processes that actually work with the people who need to use them. When he team was dissolved for budget cuts he was afraid he'd never be able to be in a role like this due to the challenges of getting a job while autistic, and the expectations that these roles should only be held by bright cheery extroverts.
Fortunately for us we found Brett shortly before he gave up looking for the job he wants, and focus only on a job that would keep him alive. As a founding member of our organization Brett has been coaching his team members in ways they keep insisting they've never been supported like before. He has a handful of Neruodivergent clients that he coaches, and is responsible for our wildly praised Organizational Resilience course, as well as a workshop on Psychologically Safe Feedback (Recently presented at Yale with amazing responses). Brett was recently seen presenting a custom presentation of his psych safe feedback at AutCon, a local event by autists for autists, as well as speaking on a panel at the recent UVU Autism Conference. He has been champing at the bit to get going at another large scale project like this.