Co-Designed Training Program Shows Promise for Boosting Neurodivergent Employment

Unemployment among neurodivergent adults remains one of the most stubborn disparities in the modern labor market, and a new study suggests that a carefully co-produced training curriculum may be a practical way to close the gap. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine, working with colleagues at Brown University and Columbia University, report in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that their seven-module program, originally called DIVERSE and now renamed Empower to Employment (E2E), was rated highly acceptable, feasible, and appropriate by the three groups best positioned to help neurodivergent workers succeed: job coaches, family members, and employers. The findings, drawn from a mixed-methods effectiveness-implementation hybrid trial involving 78 participants across California, offer a rare implementation-science perspective on employment support for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), a population whose employment outcomes have lagged far behind those of their non-disabled peers for decades.

The scale of the problem is striking. According to data cited in the study, unemployment among American adults with intellectual disabilities has been measured at 34 percent, while unemployment rates for autistic adults in the United States and the United Kingdom range from roughly 66 to 68 percent. Within California, individuals with developmental disabilities are employed at a rate of just 13.8 percent, compared with 61.9 percent for non-disabled individuals. Even against the broader backdrop of disability employment in the United States, where the 2025 unemployment rate for disabled Americans stood at 7.5 percent, approximately twice that of non-disabled Americans, the figures for autistic people and those with I/DD stand out as exceptionally poor. Yet many adults with I/DD express both interest in working and the capability to do so, which points researchers toward the systems surrounding the job seeker rather than the job seeker alone.

Previous work has identified a cluster of modifiable barriers that keep neurodivergent adults out of stable employment. Employers and coworkers often lack understanding of neurodivergent conditions, communication differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent colleagues create friction, workplace accommodations are inadequately implemented, and standard hiring methods rely heavily on soft skills and in-the-moment verbal performance that fail to showcase the actual work-related strengths of neurodivergent candidates. Because these obstacles are rooted in knowledge, attitudes, and practice rather than in the intrinsic abilities of workers, the Stanford-led team reasoned that educating the people who surround neurodivergent employees could shift outcomes. That reasoning placed job coaches, who provide practical and emotional support on the job site and broker relationships between employers and employees, at the center of the intervention, alongside parents and guardians who often serve as lifelong advocates, and employers whose beliefs and workplace cultures ultimately determine whether inclusive hiring succeeds.

The curriculum itself was built through community-based participatory research, a methodology that treats community stakeholders as co-designers rather than subjects. Over eight months of virtual working group meetings, supplemented by feedback assignments between sessions, the research team iterated on draft modules with a stakeholder group that included neurodivergent adults, job coaches, employers, educators, family members, and mental health providers. The resulting program comprises seven online modules covering education on I/DD, building rapport, communication with people with I/DD, the hidden curriculum of the workplace, supporting social competence at work, addressing the needs and concerns of employers and coworkers, and supporting work routines. Each module pairs a 15-to-20-minute video with a handout and a quiz, and participants in the trial had up to six weeks to complete the sequence, needing to score at least 80 percent on each quiz before advancing. Earlier preliminary research had already shown that completing the curriculum increased objective knowledge, self-efficacy, and self-rated coaching competencies among participants.

What remained unknown was whether the curriculum could travel beyond the research setting, which is precisely the question the new implementation study was designed to answer. The team used a Hybrid Trial Type 1 design, a framework from implementation science in which an intervention’s effectiveness is tested in a real setting while barriers and facilitators to broader rollout are examined simultaneously. Quantitatively, participants completed the Acceptability of Intervention Measure, the Intervention Appropriateness Measure, and the Feasibility of Intervention Measure, four-item scales developed by Weiner and colleagues that showed strong internal consistency in this sample, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.94, 0.95, and 0.88 respectively. Qualitatively, 25 randomly selected participants, including 10 job coaches, 10 parents, and 5 employers, completed semi-structured interviews structured around the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, or CFIR, a widely used compilation of constructs that organizes implementation determinants into four domains: innovation characteristics, outer setting, inner setting, and individual characteristics.

The quantitative results were unambiguous. Across all participant types, mean ratings were high for acceptability (4.28 on a 5-point scale), feasibility (4.34), and appropriateness (4.25), and univariate analyses of variance detected no significant differences by participant type, gender, race, or ethnicity. The interview data reinforced this picture: participants identified more facilitators than barriers, and more similarities across groups than differences. Among the most frequently cited facilitators were the perception that the curriculum is helpful and easy to complete, its fulfillment of a genuine need in the community, its compatibility with personal and organizational values such as inclusivity and person-centered practice, and the visible imprint of stakeholder co-development. A receptive implementation climate within a workplace or family emerged as a key inner-setting facilitator, endorsed 24 times, and many participants suggested that making the training a requirement for employment-support roles would further accelerate adoption.

The barriers, while fewer, were informative. The dominant theme concerned content: participants wanted practical tools such as templates and checklists, additional topics including the job application and recruitment process, translations into other languages, versions tailored to specific circumstances, and more video examples. Some parents felt their needs were addressed less explicitly than those of job coaches, and a minority of participants reported difficulty remembering the material after completion. At the organizational level, barriers included job coaches’ heavy caseloads, workplaces that were slow to change or too large or too small to implement the program effectively, and simple time constraints. At the individual level, low self-efficacy about applying the lessons, particularly among family members, was the most cited obstacle. Notably, while 70 percent of job coaches and 60 percent of employers expressed confidence in implementing the curriculum in practice, only 30 percent of family members did, and some parents and employers reported confidence in understanding the material without confidence in applying it.

The group-level differences, though smaller than the similarities, carry practical weight for dissemination. Employers unanimously found the program easy to complete and all reported a receptive implementation climate at their organizations, whereas parents were the most likely to want more content, a broader audience, and a changed training structure. Job coaches, drawing on familiarity with other training programs, were the most likely to judge DIVERSE superior to alternatives, and they uniquely emphasized organizational history and the potential of human resources departments as implementation allies. Employers gravitated toward professional development incentives and the onboarding process as natural entry points. These patterns suggest that a one-size-fits-all rollout would miss opportunities: certification mechanisms may motivate professionals, while family-centric adaptations are needed for parents who currently feel underserved by a curriculum oriented toward workplace settings.

The research team has already acted on the feedback. Supplementary modules on understanding challenging behavior and navigating workplace accommodations have been developed, the curriculum has been renamed E2E and migrated to a modern learning management system capable of scaling, a free version is available on the team’s website, and translations into Mandarin, Cantonese, and Spanish have been completed alongside a version using neurodiversity-affirming language for those who do not identify with the I/DD framework. Partnerships with corporations, educational institutions, workforce development agencies, and professional organizations are planned, including certification and credentialing pathways to incentivize busy professionals. The authors acknowledge limitations, including a self-selected, predominantly female, California-based sample and comparatively low employer enrollment, which means findings apply most confidently to job coaches and parents. Even so, the study stands as an unusually rigorous demonstration that implementation science, applied to a strengths-based, community-designed intervention, can convert the persistent problem of neurodivergent unemployment into a tractable training challenge, one stakeholder at a time.

Subject of Research: Implementation of a co-produced workplace training curriculum for supporters of neurodivergent individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities

Article Title: Implementing a Co-produced Curriculum for Neurodivergent Individuals in the Workplace

Article References: VanDaalen, R. A., Hsiao, Y. J. E., Zhao, J. L., Karsting, H., Woo, S. M., Zhen, C., McGovern, M., & Fung, L. K. (2026). Implementing a Co-produced Curriculum for Neurodivergent Individuals in the Workplace. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07515-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07515-w

Keywords: autism, neurodiversity, employment, intellectual and developmental disabilities, implementation science, job coaches, community-based participatory research, workplace training, CFIR, mixed methods, Stanford University, vocational support