Young, autistic, no direction: why starting with the file does not work

Search for guidance for an autistic teenager and the first page answers with acronyms. Special schools, adapted classes, disability recognition, specialised employment services, supported employment. Serious schemes, run by people who know their field. And one absence: at no point does anyone ask the young person what they do with their days when nobody asks anything of them.

That is not a detail. A scheme answers the question “where can we take you in”, never the question “where are you heading”. As long as the second has no beginning of an answer, the first runs empty: the young person is enrolled, oriented, supported, and stays in the same place.

A blind spot you can count

At the end of 2021, the French statistics institute counted 1.4 million young people aged 15 to 29 neither in employment, education nor training, 12.8 % of the age group, peaking at 24. The institute says nothing about autism, and we will not make it say what it does not. But that figure describes exactly where young people land when orientation has failed: not at work, not at school, not in training.

On the autism side, the figures are more fragile, and that has to be said. A written question tabled in the French Senate in 2023 repeats the most quoted estimate, from the association Autisme France: 15 to 20 % of autistic people would be in employment. The ministry’s reply gives no rate, but one concrete measure: 7,921 people in the national supported employment scheme as of 31 March 2023, one in five with an autism spectrum condition. Set against the 600,000 autistic people the same text estimates in France, that says how long the road still is.

These schemes work for those who reach them. The problem sits upstream: to reach them, you already need to know what you are going there for.

What the file does not know about you

A file knows your school record, your assessments, your accommodations. It does not know that you have set up three game servers and moderated a community of four hundred people. It does not know that you can tell any bird by its song, that you taught yourself to retouch photos, or that you have kept the household accounts since you were fourteen.

Those are not hobbies. They are skills, often sounder than anything a school placement would have produced, because they were repeated for hundreds of hours out of taste. We have written this before about adults changing careers: invisible strengths count. For a young person with no CV it is even truer: it is all they have, and it is a lot.

The other thing the file ignores is how you function. The noise that drains you in twenty minutes, the unexpected change that flattens the day, the vague instruction that blocks everything. We have shown that what makes a job bearable or unbearable plays out in those conditions, far more than in the job title. A young person who knows their conditions already holds half of their direction.

Where we start

So we built a mode for people aged 15 to 25 who are autistic or recognise themselves in it. It is called Starter Work, and it fits in one sentence: your first path, no CV.

Six questions, one per screen, phrased literally. What you do for hours. What drains you in under an hour. What you have already done that you are happy with. How you learn best. Who is helping you right now. What would be good in a year. Each can be skipped. If the free mini-test was taken first, its six axes come along and count.

The output is a sketch: a few leads to go and check. No job application as a first step, but a day of observation, an immersion, a short training, and always with someone: a parent, a school counsellor, a youth employment adviser. Relays are named when they match the situation. The file comes afterwards, once you know what it is for.

Under fifteen, nothing starts without a parent: they receive an email, they click, and they are the one who opens the door. No health data is requested. And we promise neither a job, nor a training place, nor a final answer: a sketch is a starting point you redo once you have moved on.

If you support a young person in this situation, the Starter Work page explains the rest, including what we do not do.