Recently, the rampant increase in cyber breaches across many major companies have exposed highly sensitive customer information (like social security numbers, bank accounts and other vital identifying information) to fraud and other cyber crimes. This has prompted a lot of people to question these companies and to demand a huge improvement of the safety of their systems. But protecting the system requires an expansion of the available skilled labor in technology, and apparently there is a growing gap in that area. Currently, there is a shortage of workers skilled in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields which will reportedly grow to 1.2 million job openings by 2018 and (according to a McKinsey Global Institute report) a shortage of 95 million skilled workers by 2020. Companies like Microsoft and SAP are filling this talent gap by hiring individuals with autism because these individuals possess in-demand skills in STEM fields such as extreme attention to detail or the ability to focus on highly repetitive tasks (like quality checking software or finding anomalies in data).

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