What Autistic Adults Taught Me

Part 1: The Question I Thought I Already Knew the Answer To

By Dr. Leanna Range-Norwood | The Range Collective | June 2026

I have spent more than 30 years in education. I have taught second graders how to sound out words, led lower school faculty through curriculum overhauls, coached students through college essays and scholarship interviews, and walked countless families through the kind of transitions that keep parents up at night.

In all that time, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what it means to support someone's growth. I thought I knew what "readiness" looked like. I thought I understood work.

Then I started asking autistic adults what work actually felt like to them.

And I realized I had a lot to learn.

Where this started

In 2022, I began doctoral research at Baylor University with one central question: what do autistic adults themselves say about work and employment?

Not what employers say. Not what job coaches say. Not what the research says about intervention outcomes. What do the people doing the work — navigating the interviews, managing the environments, negotiating the unwritten rules — actually say?

Self-determination theory gave me a framework. Developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, it holds that human beings have three core psychological needs: autonomy (the sense that your actions reflect your own values and choices), competence (the sense that you are capable and effective), and relatedness (the sense that you are connected to and cared for by others). When these needs are met, people thrive. When they are consistently thwarted, people disengage, burn out, or simply stop trying.

The theory was developed with neurotypical populations in mind. I wanted to know whether it held for autistic adults in employment settings. More importantly, I wanted to know what it looked like in practice, through their own words.

What I expected to find

I will be honest with you. I walked into this research with assumptions.

I expected to hear about disclosure decisions. About sensory challenges in open-plan offices. About the difficulty of reading social cues in interviews. About the gap between what autistic adults are capable of and what employers are willing to see.

All of those things came up. But they were not the whole story. Not even close.

What I was not prepared for was how clearly and specifically the participants could articulate what made work feel meaningful versus what made it feel unbearable. How thoughtfully they described the conditions under which they had thrived, sometimes in spite of organizational cultures that were never designed with them in mind. How often they named the same things, in different words, that self-determination theory would predict, but with a texture and precision that the theory alone could not have given me.

They were not waiting to be understood. They had already done the work of understanding themselves.

The thing that stopped me in my tracks

About halfway through my data analysis, I kept returning to a pattern I had not anticipated.

Participant after participant described the experience of being good at a job, genuinely skilled and productive and even recognized for their contributions, while simultaneously feeling invisible, misread, or managed in ways that felt arbitrary and destabilizing. The competence need was being met. The autonomy and relatedness needs were not.

And what struck me most was this: they knew it. They could name it. They were not confused about what was happening to them. They were simply not being asked.

That is when I understood something that I should have understood much earlier in my career. Knowing that someone has a disability does not tell you what they need. Asking them does.

Why this matters for the work I do

The Range Collective exists at the intersection of education, career readiness, and human potential. My work with students and young adults has always centered on helping people identify their strengths and build plans that are genuinely theirs.

What my research confirmed is that this orientation, which feels almost commonsense to me now, is not actually how most employment support is structured. Most support is designed to help people fit into existing systems. Very little of it starts by asking what conditions allow a specific person to do their best work.

For autistic adults, that gap has real consequences. It shows up in turnover, in underemployment, in the kind of quiet exit from the workforce that never makes it into the data.

It does not have to be that way.

What comes next in this series

Over the next three posts, I will share more of what I learned, including specific themes that emerged from the research, what self-determination theory looks like in the real experiences of autistic workers, and what educators, employers, and career practitioners can actually do differently.

I will also share what this research has shifted in my own practice, because it has.

If any of this resonates with you, whether you are an autistic adult who recognizes yourself in what I have described, a parent or educator trying to do better by the young people in your care, or an employer who genuinely wants to build a more inclusive workplace, I would love to hear from you.

The best research is the kind that starts a conversation, not ends one.

Dr. Leanna Range-Norwood is the founder of The Range Collective, LLC, an autism-informed consulting and career services practice. She earned her EdD in Learning and Organizational Change from Baylor University in 2026. Her research, "What Autistic Adults Say About Work: Applying Self-Determination Theory to Vocational Practice," will be presented at the Texas CEC ReBOOT Conference in June 2026.

Reach out at info@therangecollective.com or book a free consultation at therangecollective.com.

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