How to access
Read the information on this page before you access services at Buying for Victoria
Cost
Your diversity and inclusion or HR teams will arrange payment for these services.
Services offered
Neurodivergent employees can access counselling or coaching. People managers can access training for themselves and their teams.
You can be on a fixed-term contract, secondment or a casual. All services can be online, on-site, ongoing or on-demand.
The services focus on Autism Spectrum Disorder (or ASD) and ADHD. In the future, we’ll add services for other neurodivergent identities.
Neurodivergent employees
When you use this service, your personal information is confidential.
You can get counselling on:
- career development
- hard workplace situations
- how to talk about your workplace adjustment needs
- your day-to-day work
- recruitment process.
To use this, meet with your manager or diversity and inclusion or HR teams.
They may need to speak with someone else to approve it. But they won’t reveal who you are.
You can share this page with your manager if they don’t know about these services. Your manager can learn how they and your team can support you.
People managers
You can use these services to:
- increase your team’s awareness about neurodiversity
- support your neurodivergent employees
- run training on things like what neurodiversity is, inclusive recruitment and more.
It’s good to use these services within 12 weeks of when an employee starts.
Speak with your diversity and inclusion team for a full list of services and prices.
Manager obligations
The law says you must take steps to support employees with disability.
These services will help you support your neurodivergent employee with:
- their wellbeing
- workplace adjustments.
Your employee doesn’t have to share health information to get these services.
Their use of these services must be confidential. This includes when you approve funds.
Read more in the Federal Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act 2010.
About neurodiversity and neurodivergence
The term ‘neurodiversity’ describes the idea that in society:
- humans have a range of different brains and there is no ‘right’ brain
- each human is unique and society is ‘neurodiverse’.
Some people use the term ‘neurotypes’ to refer to the different types of brains that make up a neurodiverse society.
‘Neurodivergent’ refers to a person with a neurotype in the minority. This means their brain is different to that of most other people.
There is no official list of identities or conditions where a person can be referred to as neurodivergent.
For these services, we use the term neurodivergent to refer to the following:
- Autism
- ADHD
- Dyslexia
- Dyscalculia
- Dysgraphia
- Dyspraxia.
People have different opinions on what they think should be included under the umbrella term ‘neurodivergent’.
People with one or more of these identities or conditions may call themselves a ‘neurodivergent person’. Others may not use the term neurodivergent and may refer to themselves with a different word, such as ‘dyslexic’ or ‘dyspraxic’.
Language in the neurodiversity space changes frequently. It’s always best to ask a neurodivergent person what language they prefer.
Neurodiversity confidence
We want inclusive and safe public sector workplaces.
Neurodiversity confidence means you:
- have the skills to hire and support neurodivergent employees as they grow their career
- know how to use policies to make neurodivergent employees feel included
- can reach more job applicants
- play a role in changing what the community thinks
- work to remove barriers to successful and meaningful employment.
These services support Getting to work: Victorian public sector disability employment action plan 2018 to 2025.