Almost a third of neurodivergent employees (31%) have not told their line manager or HR about their neurodivergence, according to the CIPD’s Neuroinclusion at work report. Now think about how most organisations make learning accessible: someone asks for an adjustment, and L&D provides it. If a third of the people who might need that adjustment never ask, the system is failing before it starts. Neuroinclusive training works best as a design standard applied to every programme, and most L&D teams have not yet adopted one.
Why neuroinclusive training has to start with design
The request-based model assumes people know what they need, feel safe asking for it, and have the time to ask before a deadline. Plenty of neurodivergent employees meet none of those conditions. Some are undiagnosed. Some have had bad experiences of disclosure. Others simply do not want to be the person who holds up the cohort.
The CIPD found that among neurodivergent employees who have not disclosed, 37% worry about stereotyped assumptions and 29% are concerned about the impact on their career. Those are exactly the people sitting silently through a workshop that does not work for them, or failing a timed compliance quiz and quietly retaking it. The organisation then reads the result as a capability issue, when it is a design issue.
There is also a capability gap inside organisations. The same CIPD research found that only 24% of employers provide training on how to support neurodivergent team members, and the City & Guilds 2025 Neurodiversity Index reported that 35% of neurodivergent respondents had no onboarding support when they started their jobs. If managers are not equipped and onboarding is a lottery, formal learning is often the main structured support a new joiner gets. It needs to work.
Where L&D programmes quietly shut people out
Compliance e-learning is the most common culprit. Dense screens of text, narration that cannot be paused or slowed, mandatory click-through timers and an end-of-module quiz under time pressure can make a 20 minute module take an hour for a dyslexic learner, or become impossible to focus on for someone with ADHD. The content may be essential, but the format is testing reading speed and stamina rather than understanding.
Timed assessments deserve particular scrutiny. Unless speed is part of the job, a timer measures something you did not set out to measure. The same applies to assessments that rely on a single format, such as a written test for a skill that will be used verbally on the job.
Live workshops create different barriers: a full day in a bright, noisy room, cold-calling, unannounced group exercises, role play sprung on people, and slides that are not shared in advance. Leadership programmes add another layer, with residential formats, heavy networking expectations and assessment centres that reward a narrow idea of confidence. Onboarding often compresses all of this into the first fortnight, when people are already managing a new environment, new names and new systems.
What the evidence on learning design tells us
Cognitive load theory, developed by the educational psychologist John Sweller from the late 1980s, starts from a simple point: working memory is limited, and anything in a learning experience that uses it up without helping people learn makes learning harder. Cluttered layouts, unnecessary animations, instructions split across several screens and talk-over slides packed with text all add this extraneous load. For many neurodivergent learners, working memory and processing speed are precisely where the friction already sits, so poor design hits them hardest. Everyone else pays a smaller price too.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is the most established framework for designing around this. CAST, the organisation behind it, released version 3.0 of the UDL Guidelines in July 2024, organised around three principles: multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. In plain terms, give people different reasons and ways to engage, present information in more than one form, and let them show what they have learned in more than one way.
The evidence is encouraging but honest about its limits. A 2023 meta-analysis by King-Sears and colleagues, covering 20 studies, found a moderate positive effect of UDL-based instruction on learner achievement, with a somewhat smaller effect for adults than for children. Most of the research comes from education rather than workplaces, and study quality varies. But the direction is consistent, and the principles cost little to apply.
Design principles for L&D teams
Share materials in advance as standard, in an accessible, editable format, so people can preview, use their own reading tools and arrive prepared. Offer content in at least two forms, for example a short video with captions and a transcript, or a written guide with a diagram. Let learners control pace: pause, rewind, speed up, skip what they already know and return later.
Remove timers from assessments unless speed is a genuine job requirement, and where possible offer a choice of how to demonstrate competence. In live sessions, publish an agenda with timings, build in breaks, make participation opt-in rather than cold-called, and give a clear written summary of actions afterwards. For leadership programmes, ask whether every element tests something that matters for the role, or whether some simply reward people who are comfortable with large groups and improvisation.
Finally, write plainly. Short sentences, one idea per screen, meaningful headings and consistent layouts help everyone, and they make content easier to translate and update.
Practical next steps
Pick your three highest-volume programmes, which for most organisations will be mandatory compliance training, onboarding and a core management course, and audit them against the principles above. Ask a small group of neurodivergent colleagues to test them and pay attention to where they slow down, drop out or work around the design. Add neuroinclusion criteria to your procurement checklist so that bought-in content meets the same standard as content built in-house. Then track completion times, pass rates and feedback by format, so you can see whether changes are working rather than assuming they are.
All of this fits within existing programmes and budgets. What it asks of L&D is a shift in mindset: treating neurodivergent learners as part of the core audience rather than an exception to be handled on request.
Most of these principles land or fail with line managers. Enna’s Supporting and Managing Neurodivergent Employees training gives managers practical skills they can use the next day, delivered in person or virtually. Book a call to schedule sessions for early 2027.
