The Same Gap Twice: Executive Function from Campus to the First Job
September, 9th
Students learn to ask for what they need in college. Then they start a job, and the whole thing resets.
A program spends two, three, four years getting a student to the point where they can run their own week. Plan it. Start the hard thing. Send the email nobody made them send. Then the student graduates, walks into a first job, and every one of those supports goes away again, along with the person who knew their name.
We already know this pattern. It is the high school to college handoff, the one every disability services office and transition coordinator has been arguing about for twenty years. What gets less attention is that it happens a second time, at the exit, and this time there is no receiving office at all.
The numbers got worse, not better
Understood.org ran its third annual Neurodiversity at Work survey with The Harris Poll in March 2026, covering 2,073 U.S. adults, 614 of whom identify as neurodivergent. Two findings should stop anyone who runs a program with an employment outcome attached to it.
Don't know what they're entitled to
70% of neurodivergent employees
Up from 60% in 2024.
Don't know who to ask
60% of neurodivergent employees
Up from 49% in 2024.
Both went the wrong way. And they went the wrong way during a period of rising awareness, when 31% of U.S. adults identify as neurodivergent and 85% of adults say employers need better education on accommodations. Awareness went up. Knowing what to do on a Tuesday morning went down.
Asking also is not free. Seventy-nine percent of neurodivergent adults say there is stigma around requesting workplace accommodations. In the 2024 version of the same survey, among everyone who had requested an accommodation, nearly one in four said they lost their job or were demoted afterward. Whatever we tell students about self-advocacy, they are walking into a room where the request carries a real cost, and they can feel it.
Why the work version is harder than the college version
College is unstructured compared to high school. Work is unstructured compared to college.
A syllabus is a plan somebody else wrote
It lists what is due and when. A job hands you a set of ongoing responsibilities with no due dates attached, a manager who assumes you will raise your hand if something is wrong, and feedback that arrives quarterly instead of weekly. The demand on planning, task initiation, and time estimation goes up again, right when the last scaffolding falls away.
And there is no disability services office
There is a human resources department, which is not the same thing, is not neutral, and in most people's minds sits closer to the manager than to the employee. The student who finally learned to email a professor now has to work out whether the same move is safe with a boss.
So the skill we spend college building is the skill that gets tested hardest in the first six months of a job, in an environment with fewer supports and higher stakes. That is the gap. Not graduation. The handoff after it, the one nobody owns.
People are already solving this privately
Here is the part I find most telling. In the same survey, 78% of neurodivergent employees report using artificial intelligence tools at work, against 59% of neurotypical employees. That is a 19 point gap.
Read that next to the accommodation numbers and the story writes itself. Seven in ten do not know what they are entitled to, six in ten do not know who to ask, four in five are quietly using a tool that does not require them to ask anybody. When a formal process feels risky and a private one does not, people pick the private one.
Worth being careful here
A 2025 study in BMC Psychology had ChatGPT generate executive function support plans for people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and found the output coherent and reasonably thorough, but inconsistent in how well it adapted to individual differences without an expert reviewing it.
A tool nobody is checking is not the same as support. It is a workaround, and workarounds are what people build when the real thing feels unavailable.
What a program can actually do about it
Three things, and none of them requires a new budget line.
Make the last term the rehearsal
If a student is going to have to ask a manager for something, they should have asked for something before they leave you, in a setting where the answer being no costs them nothing. Practice the request, not the vocabulary.
Teach the functional version of the ask
The workplace conversation does not go well when it starts with a diagnosis. It goes better when it starts with what helps: written instructions after verbal ones, a quiet room for focused work, a weekly check-in on priorities. That translation is a teachable skill, and almost nobody teaches it.
Say out loud that the support disappears
Students who are told will be surprised. Students who are not told will conclude they are the problem. That is the difference between a hard first year and a first year that ends in a resignation.
The short version
The transition from college to work is not the finish line for a program with an employment outcome. It is the second cliff, it looks a lot like the first one, and right now nobody is standing at the bottom of it.
Sources: Understood.org and The Harris Poll, "Neurodiversity at Work Survey 2026," fielded March 19-23, 2026, 2,073 U.S. adults ages 18 and over, 614 neurodivergent, accurate to plus or minus 2.5 percentage points at 95 percent confidence; Understood.org and The Harris Poll, 2024 Neurodiversity at Work Survey; BMC Psychology (2025), "Exploring AI-assisted design of executive function rehabilitation programs for individuals with ADHD."
