Wasted Talent

Rethinking how we recognise experience, capability and potential in later working life.

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

I dedicate this blog to my friend Jay, who sees me and is the inspiration behind this piece. Thank you.

“Wasted talent” is a phrase we hear frequently. It usually describes young people who leave education without opportunities, gifted individuals who never fulfil their potential, or graduates unable to find suitable work. Rarely do we apply it to adults whose knowledge, experience and abilities have accumulated over decades but remain poorly recognised by the systems meant to put talent to work. I have felt like wasted talent for much of my life, and one of the hardest parts has been feeling unseen.

Across every community there are people with remarkable skills, resilience and insight. Some have developed these through conventional careers. Others through caring responsibilities, disability, volunteering, community leadership and self-employment. Many have spent years solving problems, adapting and understanding systems in ways that no formal qualification could fully teach. The problem is not always that their talent is invisible. Sometimes it is visible but misunderstood.

Employment systems can too easily assume that capability and support need are opposites. Someone who needs structure, accountability or help navigating recruitment may be seen as less capable. Someone who is articulate, experienced and able to think strategically may be assumed to need little support. Neither assumption is necessarily true.

For some neurodivergent people, external structure is not merely helpful; it is enabling. Routine, defined roles, clear expectations and administrative procedures create the conditions in which strengths can flourish. Without these, capability can be misread as inconsistency. With them, contribution becomes visible and sustainable. Structure is not simply about routine. It also includes the wider infrastructure of employment: colleagues, workplace systems, IT support, shared administration, a regular salary and the everyday organisational scaffolding that most employees rarely have to think about.

At the same time, many neurodivergent people also need flexibility: space to think, process information and work in ways that suit how their minds function. The difficulty is that employment systems often present this as a choice. Conventional employment may provide structure but not enough flexibility. Self-employment may provide flexibility but remove much of the organisational support that makes work sustainable. This contradiction is very real to neurodivergent people, and our recruitment systems compound it further.

Those systems are built around a particular shape of working life: linear, upward and documented in a form that employers and automated screening systems can quickly understand. They are much less effective at recognising people whose careers have been disrupted by redundancy, disability, neurodivergence, mental ill-health or years spent creating work around systems that did not fit them. A non-linear career can look like inconsistency. It may actually represent years of adaptation and attempts to remain economically active.

There are also assumptions built into employment and recruitment systems about the skills people are expected to have acquired along the way. People are often expected to know how to present themselves, read workplace culture, navigate interviews, build networks, understand progression and translate their experience into employer language. But not everyone has had the family support, school support, workplace mentoring or professional networks that allow those skills to develop. That does not mean they lack ability. It may mean some of the hidden rules of work were never properly explained or scaffolded.

There is also an assumption that people who remain unseen simply need to make themselves more visible. They are encouraged to promote themselves, build a profile, network and keep putting themselves forward. I have tried hard to do this, but I find it difficult and draining. I am not naturally performative and do not enjoy social media. Why should recognition depend on becoming louder or creating a public version of yourself that does not feel natural? Talent should not become less valuable simply because someone is quiet, private or uncomfortable with self-promotion.

There is also a later-life dimension that deserves much greater attention. People in their fifties and sixties may still have considerable ability, experience and a desire to contribute, but may already have spent years outside conventional employment. This can leave them without recent employed experience or workplace networks, while gaps in pension contributions and familiarity with changing workplace technology continue to grow. They still want to work, believe they have much to contribute and should have a fair opportunity to do so.

The phrase “just get a job” misses this completely. Many people have worked, adapted, taken whatever work was available and kept trying. But later in life, especially after illness, trauma, redundancy, caring, late diagnosis or years of unstable work, the question is not simply whether someone is willing to work. It is whether there is a realistic route into work that reflects their experience, does not damage their health and gives them enough secure income to plan their life. Wanting work that is paid properly, sustainable and suited to someone’s capability is what good work should mean.

Yet the support offered can still be based on a basic employability model rather than asking a more difficult question: at what level could this person contribute if the right environment and support were around them?

What may be missing is not another short course or job-search programme, but a form of capability brokerage. Someone who can see the whole person, understand a non-linear work history, recognise the level at which they could contribute and help bridge the gap between that capability and the right employer. This is part of the thinking behind my idea of a Neuro Agent: not somebody who simply signposts or fills in forms, but someone who recognises, translates and helps broker capability while providing continuity through the transition into work.

This is also where current digital and AI employment support may need to go further. An AI tool may be able to suggest possible job roles, but if it then sends someone back out to search across multiple websites, the hardest part has not been solved. For someone who does not know which job titles to search for, or who becomes overwhelmed by fragmented systems, signposting alone is not enough. A more inclusive approach would translate a person’s experience into possible role families, search current vacancies across trusted sources and return a small, realistic shortlist with clear reasons why each role may fit. This would not replace human employment support; it could make the human conversation far more useful.

There is also a human cost to being outside a workplace that is easily overlooked. Work can provide structure, belonging, connection and ordinary contact with colleagues. Long periods of isolated working can remove all of those things. For someone already prone to anxiety, the absence of people to talk things through with can make uncertainty and cognitive load considerably harder to manage.

We often talk about the benefits of work for connection and wellbeing while expecting people outside work to independently create the structure and confidence needed to return to it. Employment support needs to reflect that contradiction more honestly, asking not only whether someone is job-ready, but whether the system around them is capable of recognising what they could become with the right environment in place.

Paid work trials, supported returnships and more human recruitment processes are part of the answer, alongside people who can recognise hidden or misread capability and help employers understand it. The talent is already there. The question is whether our systems are sophisticated enough to recognise someone who can think at a high level while still needing support, structure and human connection to use that ability well.

If we genuinely believe communities contain untapped knowledge and expertise, perhaps we need to stop asking why some people have failed to fit our employment systems and start asking why our employment systems remain so poor at recognising them.