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We talk a lot here on Succeed With Dyslexia about dyslexia and employment: dyslexia and job interviews, dyslexia training for workplaces, and dyslexia and things like progression and promotion. They’re important conversations, and because people all over the world are having them, the last ten years have been a period where employment has really opened up for neurodivergent talent. We’re seeing more people with dyslexia climb the ladder into careers they love, feeling supported and valued…
But what about the other end of the scale?
A lot of the employment narratives surrounding dyslexia are about getting into work. Not much of the dialogue currently focuses on the time when we’re ready to come out of it— when we’re ready to leave the workplace and retire. But every year, more and more dyslexic individuals get ready to leave the world of work, and they’re largely a lost demographic to a lot of our online dyslexia and employment dialogues.
That’s why we’re taking a deep look at dyslexic jobs from a different perspective today. Let’s check out the facts about dyslexia and employment, retirement, and economics:
Dyslexia and employment: Who are 2023’s dyslexic retirees?
People tend to retire from full-time work when they’re around 64 or 65. If we’re to assume that a lot of 2023’s retired people entered the workplace between the ages of 16 to 20, it means that they have been working since around the mid-1970s. They likely didn’t have an employer who was particularly well informed about dyslexia, or even much in the way of support when it came to their day-to-day duties. Those things are largely a product of the last ten to fifteen years, although there may have been a few exceptions.
It’s also important to note that this generation and the one before it — the ‘Baby Boomers’ and the ‘Silent Generation’— are the living generations least likely to have ever realised that they have dyslexia, or ever sought a formal diagnosis.
What was it like navigating dyslexia and employment in the recent past?
Dyslexia and employment for 2023’s retirees might have been a bit of a strained relationship. Because dyslexia wasn’t properly understood or even really talked about, reading differences were likely to have been understood at best as a visual or learning weakness, and at worst as laziness or even a personal failing.
Reading differences might have complicated things like career progression or earning potential for this generation of workers, or impacted the transition from manual and retail occupations to corporate and clerical ones. Dyslexia likely also had an effect on their educational performance, which means that grades and university attendance may have been more difficult to achieve too.
Low Literacy, Dyslexia and Employment: how does it impact your life?
Although it’s not always accurate to equate dyslexia with low literacy— some people with dyslexia are frequent readers and have strong literacy skills, and certainly, not everybody with low literacy is dyslexic — these kinds of figures can give us at least an insight into the career course for those older dyslexic individuals who may not have received the diagnosis and support that they needed in order to thrive.
- People with lower literacy skills tend to enter the workplace earlier than those with average and high levels of literacy.
- It’s not entirely due to those with low literacy struggling to find jobs, however: it’s also to do with average and higher skilled readers being more likely to delay employment for further study.
- By the time lower-skilled readers reach middle age, although they entered the workplace earlier than their peers, they’re more likely to be unemployed or sporadically employed.
- New research in 2023 by Pro Bono Economics and the National Literacy Trust shows that the average 18-year-old classed as having ‘very poor’ literacy skills will earn around £33,000 less over their lifetime than somebody who has average reading skills.
- That’s roughly equivalent to an extra 18 months of full-time employment, as the average worker with very poor literacy earns around £21,000 per annum… around £1,500 less per year than they would if they had a basic level of literacy, according to the data.
- This data also raises the issue of retirement funds: when earnings are lower, people often tend to retire with smaller pensions and less in savings and investments.
- Because of this financial disparity, individuals with low literacy who do stay in work also tend to retire much later than people with average and high literacy skills— with those in manual professions or retail working well into their late sixties and even seventies.
- …Things do get more complicated as we climb the career ladder and look at higher technical roles, though.
Sources: The Literacy Changes Lives Report (2008), National Literacy Trust; Literacy and Life Expectancy (2018), National Literacy Trust; The Impact of Poor Literacy (2023), Adult Literacy Trust.
Higher technical roles, retiring early and the digital skills divide
Not every dyslexic person retires late. Some retire early due to issues in finding or maintaining a job: in an era of large-scale redundancies like this year, many older dyslexic people have suddenly found themselves out of work. They may even have been targeted during a redundancy selection process due to specific performance or behavioural criteria with no consideration of their dyslexia, which is against UK dyslexia and employment law… but it still happens. Now more than ever, employers require high levels of digital skills and literacy for clerical and higher roles, and thanks to processes like CV scanning, AI interviews and mass competition, getting a job is far more complicated than it was a decade ago. Dyslexia and employment is already somewhat of a strained relationship sometimes, and these new ways of screening candidates can make things more difficult from the moment you start searching for roles.
Early retirement might also be a choice. Some dyslexic members of the higher professional workforce retire early due to what we’ve come to term the ‘digital skills divide’: an emerging gap between the tech-literate members of society who have grown up with or transitioned well into the digital era, and members of society who have had limited access to technology or developed a lower level of digital fluency. Navigating dyslexia and employment isn't always about the day-to-day of getting a job and showing up, or even holding onto a job when things get tough— sometimes it's simply about how possible you find the work.
When paper systems transition to digital or when older digital systems are updated, new skills need to be fostered within the workforce. Without the right support and understanding, colleagues with dyslexia might find it difficult to make the shift: as well as reading differences, they might experience sequencing or processing problems, or even just issues with confidence and memory. Younger dyslexic professionals are more likely to know that they’re dyslexic, what support rights they have, and find digital work natural, whereas older ones are less likely to know about and advocate for their neurodivergence, and may find new technologies intimidating to master.
When day-to-day systems feel impossible to get to grips with and the workplace appears to be progressing past you at an alarming rate, many dyslexic professionals consider an early retirement even if they’d like or need to keep working.
Dyslexia and retirement: Communicating and socialising
One thing that happens when we retire is that often, although there’s more time to spend socialising and on hobbies during our day, is that our social circles tend to shrink. Colleagues provide a lot of our day-to-day interactions especially if you work face-to-face, and taking a step back from that means that we tend to rely more on digital devices for company, to arrange events, and to keep up to date with milestones and news. With the rise of social media and instant messaging, we do tend toward calling less and messaging more in the 2020s so there’s a shift toward written communication to consider: older dyslexic people might find a lot of benefit in installing screen readers on phones, laptops and tablets to support them as they work through text-based communications. It’s also important to have conversations about how people prefer to communicate too, and to ensure that you’re keeping arrangements inclusive for your dyslexic family and friends.
Conversely, stepping away from the workplace might mean that they’re going to lose access to some of their supports that may have been obtained through that business, so it’s important to make sure that dyslexic retirees have access to their own text-to-speech scanning devices and software for use in their personal lives.
You can find out more about ensuring that older people with dyslexia understand the nature of their neurodiversity journey, that they’re informed, and that they’ve got access to the right kinds of support in our Succeed With Dyslexia article Talking to Older People about Dyslexia.
Dyslexia and Employment: Why does workplace training matter?
Colleagues with dyslexia need the right support whether they’re just starting out on their employment journey or if they’re coming to the age where they might be thinking about retiring. As we’ve seen above, dyslexia can impact things like skills confidence and digital literacy very powerfully for older people in employment… and that might lead to a lot of unnecessary distress for the colleagues in question. It can also lead to the loss of established talent too, which is bad news for businesses— especially as many other businesses are waking up to the possibilities of dyslexic talent.
It might be a complicated support landscape for HR and management to navigate, but businesses aren’t expected to know everything about dyslexia and employment the first time. That’s where workplace neurodiversity training comes in: when an expert professional can act as a guide through the processes of assessment, access funding and reasonable adjustments, it makes things easier for everybody, especially when things like changing systems or just the general digital shift come into play. They can also support businesses in ensuring that their progression systems and promotion criteria are fair and take into account neurodivergent skills and support areas, so that dyslexic talent can climb the ladder in the same fashion that their neurotypical colleagues might, helping beat the low literacy wage gap.
