Testing my ability to fail- dyslexia and job hunting.

Here’s a weird thing; I’m glad I wasn’t diagnosed in school. I went to school in the 1990s. Where anyone with a learning disability was put on the ‘special’ table at Primary School and put in the ‘remedial’ group for everything. If I’d been diagnosed at 5 or 6 then likely at that time nobody would have expected anything of me, and as a result, I’d not have been able to do half the things I’ve done.

I’m lucky too, that reading was never an issue for me. I read lots and at a high level from a young age I like to think of my academic success in terms of what Hermione says in Harry Potter ‘Books and cleverness’ I read a lot and remembered some of it.

I could never spell. I could never do times tables. Both of which were tested weekly. Do they still make kids do that? It’s the most horrible form of torture. Sat in silence wanting to cry looking at the paper knowing you’ve no hope of remembering it. Well, that’s how I felt the other week in a job interview. Except I was doing the test in an office full of people. So, I couldn’t cry.

I walked into the interview part of the interview knowing I didn’t have a hope in hell. Hell, I’d got on the train that morning (having spent £90 in total to travel, back via bus of course) knowing it was a waste of money because they’d told me there would be a ‘test’.

And ‘test’ means using Excel, and maths. And quite often test means proofreading or editing with no computer support. And these along with the test conditions, using a new computer etc. are my nemesis in term of dyslexia. Now I’m not saying anyone LIKES doing them, or they’re fair to anyone. But quite frankly I am never, ever going to pass one of those tests.

And also, can we talk about how useless said tests are, when in the workplace, we’d all use spellcheck and google?

And that an overall measure of suitability is not a memory for formulas in Excel? And that perhaps collaborative working and skill sharing with colleagues to double check your work would probably be more useful to an employer?

It’s impossible to explain to anyone with a ‘normal’ brain what it’s like. I mean they weren’t far wrong when they used to say ‘number blind’. Logically I know how one should get to an answer, but I just can’t do it. Likewise, I can, one would hope, string a sentence or two together, but I can’t always see where the errors are. And I certainly can’t do this, in 20 minutes, under test conditions.

Give me a job and training, and I can learn it. I figure out the workaround. I make notes and lists, and I can do as good a job as anyone mostly. I’m never going to work in mathematical research or be an accountant, but in most of the kinds of jobs I’m likely to do I’ll get by. More than get by, I’ll do a good job.

But not if I can’t get past even the first hurdle.

And then come the comments of ‘well you should have disclosed your disability’

Firstly, no disability, no opinion on the politics of disclosing. I appreciate I also speak from a position of privileged in some respects because I can ‘get away’ with not disclosing because my disability isn’t obvious when I walk in a room. But people with invisible disabilities of all kinds I know will speak to the minefield of ‘do I disclose or not’.

Because like it or not, it counts against us. Whether it’s a learning disability, mental health condition, chronic illness, we all worry, rightly so, that it will count against us. The employment sector is FIERCE and cutthroat. And rightly or wrongly you think well, they’ll find another reason not to employ me. And it’s all very well saying ‘they could get in trouble’ or ‘it’s against the law’ but in a pool of high calibre candidates it’s hard to ‘prove’ that’s why you lost out…but very hard not to wonder if that’s why nonetheless.

With dyslexia also you disclose and do badly in the test, or you don’t. Either way you run the risk of being called a liar. That dyslexia isn’t real. That you were using it to get an advantage (ooh thanks 10 minutes more to do the daft test?!) and that actually you’re just a bit crap at spelling or maths and trying to get a job by faking it…

Or of course, the idea that I will never get a job because of it. Like I say, competition is fierce for jobs. And being struck off before I even start because my spelling isn’t perfect, and my maths is yes, appalling (but again, we have calculators and spellcheck people)

But what’s anyone supposed to do? I can’t help but think my dyslexia is another reason I’ll remain forever unemployable. If I can’t get past the hurdle of a test in an interview what am I supposed to do?

And it’s another barrier because I’ve been knocked right down the ladder to entry-level jobs again. Because despite working for over 15 years. I’m both ‘overqualified’ for those but also ‘fail’ because I can’t pass the tests to get through interview stages. And you know what I just want to scream, what does anyone want from me?

And what if I get a job, what then? The one time I disclosed my dyslexia was during my PhD and that ended terribly. I was accused of lying repeatedly about proofreading, even when I’d disclosed my disability. I got no support from my supervisors. In another job, I got ‘outed’ about my disability, because obviously, I have been pretty open about it on social media. Not long after I was told my fixed term contract was coming to an end, with no explanation as to why.

I’ve been told by other disabled people it’s not real. I’ve been told to just ‘try harder’ that I just have to ‘accept’ I can’t do certain jobs (well all of them if they give tests like that).

My dyslexia is a big part of the reason I failed as an academic. I wasn’t given the support I needed in that, and my confidence was further destroyed by that. As I write this, I’m giving serious consideration to giving up writing the book altogether because I just don’t think I can do it.

And it’s really sad that I struggled through all the ‘school’ there is to struggle through and proved that being dyslexic isn’t a barrier to that. But that I can’t get a simple job, because I get kicked out at the first hurdle. Or that I can’t complete the work I did as an academic either.

I would love the idea that being dyslexic just means you’re a bit stupid, that you sit at the stupid table, had stopped in the 1990s. But tragically it hasn’t. And I’m not sure what to do, or where I go from here.