Untapped Talent… Again?

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Picture of a wooden door with glass panel. Inscrition of Recruiting Talent. There are steps in front of the door, no door handle and a chain and padlock hung across the door.


I keep seeing articles about the “untapped talent” of disabled people. The phrase pops up with the reliability of a well-worn sitcom rerun. It’s meant warmly, I know. But after thirty-plus years in this field, I can’t help feeling a familiar mix of frustration and quiet amusement. Because if this really were a new idea, I must have dreamt most of the 1990s.

The Numbers Haven’t Moved Much 

Here’s the reality. In 2024, just over half of working-age disabled people in the UK were in work. For non-disabled people, it was over four-fifths. The gap sits around 28 percentage points and has done so, more or less, for decades.

If this were a graph stuck to a fridge, someone would tap it and say, “Is it supposed to do anything?”

Talent Isn’t the Problem

People sometimes ask why progress is so slow. The simplest answer? If talent were the issue, we’d have cracked it when dial-up internet was still a thing. Disabled people aren’t sitting in the dark waiting to be noticed. We’re out here, working, studying, inventing, starting businesses — the lot.

The real challenge is the environment we’re operating in.

Old Ideas in New Packaging

Workplaces still lean heavily on outdated assumptions about the “ideal worker”. Flexibility helps, yet it’s still treated as a perk rather than a design principle. And while many employers genuinely try, the everyday experience can feel like wading through glue: not dramatic, just slow, sticky, and draining.

Support systems exist — and many are brilliant in theory — but they can be clunky in practice. The fear of losing essential support when taking a job can make taking a step forward feel like stepping off a cliff. None of this speaks to ability; it speaks to structure.

The Repetition Is the Real Exhaustion

What wears you down isn’t the barriers; it’s the déjà vu. The same headlines. The same well-meaning commentary. The same promises that don’t quite land. When the next “untapped talent” article appears, I imagine disabled people everywhere offering a polite smile and thinking, “We’ve heard this tune before.”

What Needs to Change

The issue isn’t discovering talent. It’s designing work, support, and expectations so talent can flourish without heroics. When systems adjust to people — not the other way around — we stop talking about “tapping talent” and start seeing results.

Maybe that’s the real question: How do we stop wasting the talent we already have?

Because it’s here. It’s been here for decades. We’re simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

If this article resonated, feel free to share it. You can find more reflections on disability, inclusion and the odd wry observation at philfriend.co.uk.

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