The Lost Potential: Reflecting on 10 Years of Fighting Neurodivergent Unemployment
- Divergent Thinking
- Jul 16
- 7 min read
Ten years ago, I found myself sitting in Millbank Studios, moving through a marathon of regional BBC Radio interviews for The Prince’s Trust Youth Index.
It was 14 January 2015, and the numbers we were discussing felt devastating. More than a third of unemployed young people felt too anxious to even leave the house. At the time, I spoke about that reality as a kind of waking nightmare — a phrase I used often then, because it was the closest thing I had to describe what it felt like when fear, isolation and hopelessness became part of everyday life.
Listening back now, I hear a younger version of myself who understood the pain very clearly, but did not yet have the language for the system behind it.
I was already an expert by experience. I knew what it felt like to struggle, to feel shut out, to carry anxiety that made the world feel impossible. But I was still asking the question in a much more individual way:
How do we help young people become confident enough to enter the world?
Ten years later, as the founder of Divergent Thinking, I would frame that question very differently.
You can listen to the original clips here: Nat Hawley on regional BBC Radios (14/01/2015)
In 2015, we were naming the pain
Looking back, the 2015 conversation was focused heavily on the psychological fallout of unemployment.
We talked about:
anxiety
isolation
low confidence
fear of the future
young people withdrawing from the world
the emotional damage of feeling locked out of work
All of that was real.
When you are out of work for long enough, especially as a young person, the damage is not only financial. It gets into your identity. You stop feeling useful. You stop feeling wanted. The longer it goes on, the more the world outside begins to feel threatening. The job market starts to feel like a fortress, and you are standing outside it without the code.
I knew that personally.
Although I was there as a ambassador, I was also speaking as a young man with autism and dyslexia who knew what it felt like to experience paralysing fear around the outside world. So when I spoke about unemployed young people being too anxious to leave the house, I was not describing an abstract social issue. I was speaking from somewhere very real.
But even then, something was missing from the way the story was being told.
Back then, the focus was the symptom
In 2015, we were largely talking about the anxiety barrier.
And again, that barrier was real. But now I can see much more clearly that anxiety was often the symptom, not the root cause.
That is a crucial distinction.
Because if you believe the core issue is confidence, then the solution becomes:
build resilience
coach young people
improve self-esteem
help them become more employable
teach them to navigate the system better
Those things can help. But they do not go far enough if the system itself is badly designed.
That is the shift in my thinking over the last decade.
I no longer think the central problem is that neurodivergent young people lack confidence.
I think much of the problem is that they are being asked to enter environments that are actively incompatible with how their minds work.
What looked like a confidence gap was often a design gap
If I were doing those interviews now, I would not stop at the emotional reality of unemployment. I would push much harder on the structure beneath it.
Because what we often call a confidence gap is, for many neurodivergent young people, a design gap.
A young autistic person may not be failing because they lack ambition. They may be overwhelmed by interview formats built around eye contact, social performance and ambiguity.
A dyslexic young person may not be “underprepared”. They may be blocked by text-heavy applications and recruitment systems that confuse writing polish with intelligence.
A person with ADHD may not be unmotivated. They may be colliding with hiring processes that demand sustained executive functioning in exactly the places where friction is highest.
A dyspraxic young person may not be less capable. They may be navigating systems that mistake fluency, ease and speed for overall competence.
That is a very different story from “young people are too anxious to leave the house.”
The anxiety still matters. But it starts to make more sense when you understand what kind of world these young people were being asked to enter.
Neurodivergent unemployment is not just about individuals — it is about interface
This is probably the biggest shift in how I think now.
I increasingly understand neurodivergent unemployment as a compatibility crisis.
Too many neurodivergent young people are trying to run brilliant, complex, divergent minds through systems designed for a very narrow version of acceptable performance.
School often rewards one kind of learner.
Recruitment often rewards one kind of communicator.
Workplaces often reward one kind of processor.
Professional culture often rewards one kind of “normal”.
Then, when neurodivergent people struggle to move smoothly through those systems, the struggle gets personalised.
It gets turned into:
lack of confidence
lack of readiness
poor fit
weak social skills
low resilience
But a lot of the time, what we are really seeing is environmental friction.
That is one of the core ideas behind Divergent Thinking: we do not solve neurodivergent exclusion by endlessly trying to fix people for environments that remain badly designed. We solve it by redesigning the environments too.
The young people we called “vulnerable” often had exactly the strengths we needed
This is one of the most painful ironies when I think back to those 2015 interviews.
The tone back then was often one of concern, sometimes edging into pity. These were vulnerable young people. Anxious young people. Isolated young people. People at risk of being left behind.
And again, some of that framing was understandable. But it also missed something very important.
Many of those same young people likely had the kinds of minds the world now claims to want more of:
deep focus
original thinking
pattern recognition
creative problem-solving
systems awareness
honesty
persistence
unconventional insight
In other words, the very young people who looked “unemployable” under old systems were often carrying the exact strengths that modern organisations now say they need.
That is what makes this issue so tragic.
We were not just looking at suffering.
We were looking at lost potential.
At unused cognitive resource.
At innovation left sitting in bedrooms because the front door to opportunity had been designed too narrowly.
The “spiky profile” changes how you see unemployment
This is where the concept of the spiky profile matters so much.
A spiky profile means a person may have very real challenges in some areas alongside unusually high ability in others. Traditional systems often fixate on the lows and ignore the spikes.
So a neurodivergent young person may be:
slow in one format
overwhelmed in one environment
poor at one kind of presentation
awkward in one kind of interview
and still be:
brilliant at seeing patterns
highly strategic
unusually inventive
deeply focused
capable of complex problem-solving
If you only measure the lows, you call that person vulnerable.
If you understand the spikes, you begin to see value.
That shift has become central to how I work now, whether through the blog, strategy, training or workplace needs assessments. The real question is not only how to help neurodivergent people survive old systems. It is how to help organisations recognise what they are currently failing to see.
Ten years on, I no longer want to “fix” young people for broken systems
This is perhaps the clearest way I can express the change.
In 2015, the instinct was:
How do we help these young people feel more confident?
In 2026, my instinct is:
Why are we still designing systems that make so many talented young people feel broken in the first place?
That does not mean confidence-building has no place. It does. Community matters. coaching matters. Hope matters. But none of those things should be used to avoid the bigger conversation.
We should not keep asking neurodivergent young people to become infinitely adaptable to systems that refuse to adapt back.
We need:
more accessible recruitment
better designed onboarding
more neuroinclusive management
less rigid definitions of professionalism
fewer text-heavy and socially coded barriers
more environments where different minds can show what they can do
That is what the “innovative solutions” I was talking about on BBC Radio have become for me now. Not just helping people cope better, but helping systems become more compatible.
From isolation to community, from anxiety to agency
When I reflect on the last ten years, I do think there has been real movement.
Not enough. But movement.
We have moved, in some places, from:
silence to conversation
isolation to community
shame to language
anxiety to understanding
individual blame to more structural thinking
And personally, I have moved too.
I am proud of the young man sitting in that studio in 2015. He did not yet have all the answers, but he knew the pain was real and he was brave enough to speak into it. He knew that youth unemployment was not just an economic issue. It was a human one. A psychological one. A crisis of identity as much as income.
What I have now, ten years later, is a sharper lens.
I can see the architecture around the pain.
I can see that many of the young people we were talking about were not only anxious. They were trying to survive systems that made their neurodivergence feel like a liability instead of an asset.
And once you see that, you cannot unsee it.
Final reflection
When I listen back to those 2015 BBC Radio clips now, I do not hear a younger version of myself who was wrong.
I hear someone who had identified the suffering clearly, but had not yet fully named the system producing it.
Now I can.
The unemployment crisis for many neurodivergent young people is not simply about low confidence or fear of the outside world. It is about years of environmental friction, poor fit, inaccessible recruitment, narrow definitions of ability and a labour market that has historically had very little imagination for different kinds of minds.
That is why I now see those interviews not just as media appearances, but as the blueprint for the work I do today.
Because the real tragedy was never only that young people felt too anxious to leave the house.
It was that so much talent was being left there with them.
To explore more of my work as the founder of Divergent Thinking, visit the blog or learn more about workplace needs assessments.
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