LinkedIn — the missing door

Every so often someone asks me where the adults are.

We talk a great deal about autistic children: school places, assessments, the classroom, the corridor, the lunchtime yard. We talk far less about what happens when those children turn eighteen and the school door closes behind them. And one of the first doors they meet on the other side is one most of us walk through without noticing. LinkedIn.

A door built for one kind of walker

LinkedIn is where so much of working life now begins. Jobs are posted there. Recruiters search there. References are checked there. More and more, people are hired because someone saw them there.

But look at what it asks of you. Describe yourself in the voice of a confident stranger. Sell your strengths in a one-line headline. Reach out cold to people you have never met. Comment, congratulate, react, keep the small talk going, and do it all in public, where everyone can watch you get it wrong. Read the unwritten rules: how much is too much, when enthusiasm tips into oversharing, what “open to opportunities” really signals.

None of that is the job. It is the corridor to the job. And for many autistic people, the corridor is exactly where it falls apart.

I have taught young people who could tell you everything about railway timetables, a coding language or the history of one Irish parish. Young people who are honest to a fault and would never pad a CV. Those are the very qualities employers say they want. Yet the system standing between them and the interview rewards the opposite: polish, performance, and an easy fluency with social signals.

Same argument, new building

On this blog I keep coming back to one idea: change the environment, not the child. It does not stop being true when the child grows up.

We would not accept a school that let a pupil in the front door and then left them to work out every unspoken rule alone. Presence is not inclusion. Yet that is how we treat the move into work. We tell autistic adults to “build their network” and “put themselves out there”, as if the problem were their reluctance rather than the design of the door.

This is not about blaming LinkedIn, employers or recruiters. Most people using it have never had to think about how it feels from the other side. It is about noticing that a door which feels invisible to many is a wall to others.

What a better door could look like

Universal design asks us to plan for the full range of people from the start, rather than bolting on adjustments afterwards. Applied to hiring and professional networking, that could mean:

• Job posts that say plainly what the role involves, what the interview will look like, and which adjustments are available, before anyone has to ask.

• Recruiters who are open to a skills sample, a portfolio or a written answer in place of a first phone call.

• Employers who look past a thin profile and value what someone can actually do.

• Plain-language profile and message templates, so nobody has to guess what a “good” LinkedIn page looks like.

• Schools and further education building the digital job market into transition planning, not just the CV and the interview.

None of this costs much. All of it helps everyone: the anxious graduate, the person returning to work after years of caring, the person whose first language is not English. That is the whole point of universal design.

To the parents reading this

If your child is heading towards the end of school, the worry about what comes next can be enormous. I know that worry well. Transition is not only about where they go; it is about whether the doors there will open for them. It is fair, and necessary, to ask colleges, training providers and employers how theirs are built.

To the autistic adults reading this

If LinkedIn has felt like a room where everyone else knows the rules, you are not imagining it, and you are not the problem. You deserve a way in that does not ask you to become someone else first.

The missing door is not missing because autistic people cannot find it. It is missing because it was never built with them in mind. We can build it.

Elaine Walsh, Founder, Autism & Me