Employability

Working life, on your terms

For a lot of neurodivergent people, the hardest part of working life isn’t the work. It’s everything around it: interviews that reward masking, job adverts written for someone else’s brain, workplaces built around someone else’s sensory profile.

So our employability strand doesn’t teach young people to hide who they are for forty hours a week. It teaches them to know their strengths, understand their needs, and use their rights, so they can find work that fits, or ask for the changes that make it fit.

What’s here for you

  • Transition Toolkit: A practical guide to the shift from education to employment: what changes, what stays the same, and how to make the move at a pace that doesn’t overwhelm.

  • Job hunting and starting a new job. What the process actually involves, step by step, including the unwritten rules nobody tells you, so a new role starts from understanding rather than guesswork.

  • Self-advocacy and disclosure. Whether, when and how to tell an employer you’re neurodivergent is your decision. We help you weigh it up, and show you how to ask for what you need if you do.

  • Workplace adjustments checklist. Reasonable adjustments are a legal right, not a favour. This checklist sets out what you can ask for, from written instructions to sensory changes, so you go in knowing what’s possible.

  • CVs and cover letters. Practical techniques for showing what you can do, including how to talk about a non-traditional education. The route here doesn’t need hiding; it often reads as resilience, because it is.

  • Building confidence. Confidence at work grows the same way it grows at The Haven: from being somewhere you don’t have to pretend. These resources help learners carry that with them.

And if employment isn’t the path

Some of our young people will thrive in a workplace. Others will build their own thing entirely, and our Entrepreneurship strand is there for exactly that. Both count. The goal was never a job title; it’s a working life that lets a young person stay themselves.

Employability sits alongside Preparing for Adulthood and is included as standard for Haven learners.