KEY POINTS

• Employment support interventions provide individualised training and workplace support for autistic adults with the aim to enable autistic people to gain and maintain employment.
• Research shows that supported employment for autistic adults can be successful. However, the research is based on a small number of small-scale studies targeting a subgroup of autistic people.
• There is also a strong economic case for supported employment from both a health and social care perspective and a broader societal perspective, which includes productivity gains (based on employment support for the general population). In addition to being cost-effective, the intervention may also be cost-reducing.
• There is a need to examine whether the outcomes of supported employment for autistic adults from current studies can be replicated on a larger scale and to a wider subgroup of autistic people.
• The Lynx Resource Centre in Weston-super-Mare and EmployAbility in Surrey are two examples of successful implementation of employment support interventions for adults with autism. The former appears to be primarily funded by the local authority and the latter by Jobcentre Plus.