AUDIO: Managing the employee who might have ADHD

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
November 3, 2008 12:01am

Every so often a hiring manager gets a resume that shows a person has held a dozen or more jobs, often a red flag indicating a possible problem.

Now consider the resume of David Wilkowske.

“I’m up to 67 jobs and counting,” Mr. Wilkowske says.

Job hopping is not a hobby for him, but it has resulted in a new book, “The Chronic Job Hopper: My Ongoing Battle With Attention Deficit Disorder.”

Mr. Wilkowske blames his speckled career on ADHD -- attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder -- and in his book talks about why it was diagnosed well after he was an adult and his somewhat smoother career path since.

“I’ve probably been terminated three or four times and the rest I left voluntarily,” says Mr. Wilkowske. “And sometimes … to be stimulated so to speak, I would create some type of disruption within the workplace. Not physical but more of just trying to make some radical changes that management wasn’t ready for. And that’s where I’d get into trouble sometimes.”

(David Wilkowske talks about his struggles with ADHD and what managers should look for in employees – and potential hires -- in today’s CVBT Audio Interview. Please left-click on the link below to listen now, or right-click to download the MP3 audio file to your computer or mobile media device for later listening.)

About four years ago Mr. Wilkowske’s career began to even out, he says, after a graduate student identified the ADHD problem.

Mr. Wilkowske says he’s currently looking for bookkeeping or tax preparation jobs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn. Area where he lives.

“It’s been an identification process, finding out which jobs are best suited for me in terms of my handicap,” he says. “

Mr. Wilkowske says he wrote his book “primarily to raise awareness of undiagnosed ADHD.”

“No one else should have to go through what I went through in terms of life and work experiences,” he says. “If people suspect they have ADHD, they should not hesitate to be evaluated for it.”