ACCA’s Jamie Lyon explains how understanding your personal cognitive profile and building
support structures can help you thrive.
At ACCA, we believe that diverse and inclusive workforces are good for business and good for society. Our latest research in this area explores how having a neurodivergent condition has presented both work-based challenges that needed to be overcome, yet also endowed individuals with unique strengths, capabilities and qualities they have used to their career advantage.
Accountancy’s inherent structure – systematic processes, objective frameworks, pattern-based analysis – maps naturally onto neurodivergent cognitive strengths. Where some professionals may need to develop systematic thinking through training, many neurodivergent professionals think systemically by default.
While we recognise that organisations have a critical role in creating work environments where everyone can thrive, we also know that we all individually have a role to play in supporting ourselves. Our research explores five key areas where individual action creates conditions for your success. These are interconnected strategies that support you to actively shape your work environment:
1. Understanding your own cognitive profile:
Self-awareness is foundational to navigating your career strategically as a neurodivergent professional. When you understand your specific cognitive strengths and challenges you can make informed decisions about roles, environments and the support you need. For many neurodivergent professionals, formal diagnosis provides transformative reframing.
Even so, diagnosis isn’t required for success.
What matters is self-understanding: knowing what energises you versus what drains you; which environments enable your best work; and which career paths align with your cognitive strengths. Consider how your cognitive profile aligns with different roles – neither is better, they’re different, and recognising your own enables strategic career decisions.
2. Strategic disclosure decisions:
The decision to disclose your neurodivergence at work is deeply personal and profoundly strategic. Disclosure is not an obligation – it’s a choice based on careful assessment of your circumstances, organisational culture and what you hope to gain.
Disclosure can open access to formal adjustments and legal protections and reduce the exhausting burden of masking. But disclosure also carries risks. You may face lowered expectations or assumptions about capabilities that are based on diagnostic ‘labels’.
All choices are valid. Some successful neurodivergent professionals never disclose formally, relying on careful job selection and preference-based adjustments. Others disclose selectively. The right decision serves your specific goals while protecting your wellbeing and career trajectory.
3. Leveraging technology as your cognitive assistant:
Technology can be transformative for neurodivergent professionals – not as compensation for deficiency, but as amplification of capability. The right tools bridge gaps, enhance productivity and enable you to work to your cognitive strengths. These aren’t crutches – they’re professional tools readily available that align with neurodivergent needs and are usually free and easily accessible.
Neurodivergent professionals are often users of AI and technology – early adopters who intuitively understand how to leverage these tools strategically. In workplaces increasingly shaped by AI, this positions you at the forefront, not the margins. Technology doesn’t make you less capable. It makes you strategically resourceful.
4. Advocating individualised support:
The most effective workplace support is co-created, not prescribed. Generic neurodiversity adjustments’ rarely work because they assume all neurodivergent brains function identically. So:
- Reject one-size-fits-all approaches: what works for a neurodivergent colleague may be counterproductive for you.
- Be specific about your needs: specificity makes it easier for managers to say yes.
- Explain your profile: your manager doesn’t need a masterclass in your neurotype – they need to understand how your individual brain works.
- Recognise fluctuations: support requirements aren’t static. Communicate these fluctuations rather than struggling silently.
- Advocate your needs from your position of authority: you’re the expert on your own experience.
5. Building your personal support system:
Consider the following interconnected elements of a comprehensive personal support system that will enable you to navigate your career sustainably:
- Design for flexibility: your support needs will change across life stages. Build regular check-ins with yourself to reflect on what’s working and what needs to evolve.
- Invest in specialist support: consider coaching from neurodiversity-specialist professionals. External coaches provide perspectives and strategies that workplace support rarely offers.
- Build support beyond your workplace: develop external networks – professional associations, neurodivergent community groups, online networks. These provide validation and remind you you’re not alone when workplace support falters.
- Identify allies strategically: beyond your direct manager, identify sponsors and allies who could champion you. Distribute support across multiple relationships so you’re not dependent on any single person.
The combination of self-awareness, strategic disclosure, technology adoption, individualised advocacy and multi-layered support creates resilience. You cannot control organisational culture, but you can build a personal system that enables you to thrive regardless.
Explore the findings of ACCA’s latest research here.
- Jamie Lyon, Head of Skills, Sectors and Technology, ACCA
