Our Management Team
Carol Simpson
President and CEO
Carol has worked in the IT field for over 30 years, managing departments with 60+ IT professionals and project budgets of $50M. She started her career in Vancouver as a programmer at IBM Canada and moved on to operate her own software development shop, work in the private and public sectors in senior and executive levels of management, and teach at the University of Toronto.
She recently completed a one-year volunteer assignment in which she successfully recruited, trained, and onboarded 6 individuals with autism for an international company’s autism employment initiative. Carol is one of a handful of individuals in Canada who has successfully placed or hired individuals with autism into full-time careers that afford them solid, middle-class lifestyles.
In October 2015, Carol formally launched Focus Professional Services when she trained her first group of ASD individuals. Carol sees Focus as a contributor to the normalization of employing individuals with autism in the workplace. She believes strongly in the equal rights of individuals on the autism spectrum to have acceptance and inclusion in society’s constructs of community, education, governance, and employment. She has two adult sons on the autism spectrum.
Focus is a passion for Carol. It allows her to combine her considerable business, IT, and ASD knowledge to bring about social change. She gets ASD and professional business employment! Let her help you get it, too.
“I found Carol to be an absolute trustworthy partner, highly professional and business minded as well as dependable and capable. She is results-oriented and delivers to expectations. The successful launch of our Autism … program would not have been possible without Carol’s extraordinary dedication, expertise and support.”
Heather Linka
Autism Employment Consultant
Heather comes from a Speech-Language and Audiology background in Ontario, and since moving to BC in 2016, she has enjoyed working in the Autism and Employment field. She attended the Employment Supports Specialty course at Douglas College and has been working to support people on the Spectrum in various employment models, including the federal initiative Ready, Willing and Able.
Heather joined Focus in 2018 and works to connect our talent pool (employment-ready candidates) to clients of ours, who are employers in BC. She identifies roles and matches them with our candidate pool. She helps employers modify interview and assessment processes, and arranges autism awareness training for the onboarding teams to ensure they will be welcoming and inclusive. Roles she recruits include Quality Assurance Analysts, Data Test Engineers, and Software Developers. Our clients include SAP, Microsoft, ICBC and Vancity.
