Guest blog by Robert Annis, NEURO Co-Founder & Organisational Psychologist
In April to June 2026, an estimated 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training - 13% of that age group.¹ For neurodivergent young people, the challenge can be sharper still. The Buckland Review reported that only around three in ten working-age autistic disabled people were in employment, while autistic graduates were twice as likely to be unemployed 15 months after graduation as non-disabled graduates.²
Improving routes into employment matters enormously. But there is a danger in treating employment as the finish line.
Getting somebody through the door tells us recruitment has succeeded. It tells us much less about whether the work waiting for them has been designed in a way that enables them to succeed.
We spend considerable effort asking whether people are ready for work. We should be equally interested in whether work is ready for people.
Every job has an explicit specification. Alongside it sits another, rarely written down. It may require somebody to concentrate while several conversations happen nearby; retain multiple verbal instructions; continually switch between unrelated tasks; decipher which apparently urgent request is genuinely urgent; or demonstrate competence through unrehearsed social interaction.
Some of these are genuine job demands. Others are consequences of how the organisation happens to have designed the work.
Neurodivergent experience can make that distinction easier to see.
An employee with ADHD who struggles with constant interruption may expose a working environment that fragments everybody's attention. An autistic employee who finds meetings exhausting may have particular sensory or communication needs, while also revealing meetings dependent on rapid social inference, unpredictable participation and decisions that are never made explicit. A dyslexic employee requiring an alternative to a dense written procedure may reveal that the procedure was unnecessarily difficult to use in the first place.
The conclusion is not that the employee is always right and the organisation always wrong. It is that difference gives us information about the relationship between people and the systems in which they work.
This matters particularly because organisations are better at noticing failed performance than noticing what successful performance costs.
A neurodivergent employee may construct elaborate systems to compensate for working-memory demands, work after colleagues have gone home to find sufficient quiet, rehearse conversations others enter spontaneously, or consciously mask behaviours in order to meet workplace expectations. The organisation may see excellent performance while missing the extraordinary effort required to sustain it.
Someone's ability to survive an environment is not evidence that the environment is well designed.
For somebody entering employment for the first time, the consequences can be profound. Unclear priorities, sensory overload, continual interruption or exhausting social expectations may easily be internalised as personal failure: perhaps this is simply what work is like, and perhaps I am simply bad at it.
This is where occupational health (OH) has an unusually valuable perspective.
OH encounters the person, their health, the job, management practice and the working environment at precisely the point where they interact. Good OH teams already identify trends. The larger opportunity is to ask what those trends reveal about the architecture of work itself.
Reasonable adjustments are one example. Their primary purpose is rightly to enable an individual to work. But every successful adjustment also changes something in the relationship between a person and their working environment - and therefore potentially teaches the organisation something.
The familiar claim that “what is good for neurodivergent people is good for everyone” is too simplistic. One person may need quiet while another needs stimulation; one predictability while another thrives on spontaneity.
The more useful proposition is that human difference helps us see work more clearly.
Britain can become much better at getting neurodivergent young people into employment and still fail them if the organisations waiting at the other end have learned nothing about how work is designed.
Access matters. Staying, progressing, contributing and remaining well matter just as much.
Occupational health already encounters much of the evidence. The opportunity is to create a stronger route from those individual encounters back into organisational learning: asking not only, “How can we help this person fit the work?” but also, “What has this person's experience enabled us to see about the work?”
Getting somebody through the door is an achievement.
Learning from what happens to them afterwards could change the organisation.
References
1. Office for National Statistics. Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK: August 2026. 27 August 2026.
2. Department for Work and Pensions. The Buckland Review of Autism Employment: report and recommendations. 2024.