Disability Employment Options in Australia: DES, ADEs, Open Employment, and Customised Work

The post-school employment landscape for young Australians with disability is more varied than most families realise — and the gaps between options are wider than they appear from the outside. Getting employment planning right requires understanding not just which options exist, but what each actually delivers, who it's designed for, and what the current reform environment means for long-term outcomes.

The stakes are significant. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that while 80% of working-age Australians without a disability are employed, only 48% of those with disability are. For young NDIS participants aged 15–24, the open employment rate was just 20% as of late 2025. Four in five young NDIS participants were not in open employment. That gap is not inevitable — it reflects the quality of post-school planning.

Open Employment: The Goal Worth Planning For

Open employment means working in the mainstream labour market, under standard employment conditions, at award wages or above. This is the benchmark the disability sector is increasingly orienting toward — and for good reason. Open employment provides not just income but social connection, routine, and community belonging.

The barrier for many school leavers is not willingness but preparation. Open employment requires a set of skills — travel independence, workplace communication, task initiation without external prompts, and the ability to navigate social dynamics in a workplace setting — that school often addresses theoretically but rarely builds in applied contexts. This is the gap that SLES and DES are designed to close.

Families sometimes underestimate what their child can achieve in open employment when the support structure is right. Customised employment (discussed below) has demonstrated that even individuals with significant intellectual or cognitive disabilities can sustain meaningful work in the open market when the job is designed to match their specific capabilities — rather than expecting them to fit a standard job description.

Disability Employment Services (DES): The Federal Job-Placement Program

DES is a federally funded program available to any Australian with a disability, injury, or health condition who wants to find and keep work. It is not NDIS-funded; it is paid for by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and is free to access.

DES has two streams:

• Disability Management Service (DMS): For people who need support to find work but are expected to find it relatively quickly and don't require ongoing intensive support
• Employment Support Service (ESS): For people with more significant or permanent disabilities who need more intensive, longer-term employment assistance

DES providers offer job-matching, resume preparation, interview coaching, wage subsidies to employers, and ongoing job coaching once employment begins. National DES providers include APM, WISE Employment, atWork Australia, and MAX Solutions, among many others.

The quality of DES is highly variable. Providers are paid by outcomes — they receive payments when a participant enters employment and further payments when that employment is sustained for specified periods. This creates incentives toward placing people in roles quickly, which sometimes means placing them in roles that aren't sustainable. Families should ask DES providers about their job retention rates as well as their initial placement rates.

DES is typically accessed after SLES — once a school leaver has built foundational work-readiness skills. Some young people engage with DES part-way through SLES to begin exploratory employer conversations, then transition fully to DES when the SLES period ends.

Australian Disability Enterprises: The Supported Employment Sector and Its Future

Australian Disability Enterprises (ADEs) are organisations that provide supported employment — structured work environments where people with more significant disabilities can work with on-site support. Historically, ADEs operated under the Supported Employment Services Award, which used productivity-based wage assessment tools that often resulted in very low wages — sometimes well below the minimum wage.

This model is under significant pressure. The Disability Royal Commission, which concluded in 2023, made direct recommendations to end segregated employment by 2034. The Fair Work Commission has reviewed ADE wage-setting methodologies, and there is a clear policy direction toward transitioning ADEs into "social firm" models that pay full award wages and pursue commercial viability alongside social purpose.

For families currently considering ADEs as a post-school pathway, the picture is nuanced. ADEs range enormously in quality — some are genuinely well-run, offer meaningful work, and provide excellent on-site support. Others offer little more than supervised activity. The sector is also changing: the ADEs most likely to still be operating in 2034 are those that have already begun transitioning toward the social firm model.

If ADE placement is being considered, visit the facility multiple times, speak with participants and their families, ask about wage rates and what work actually involves day-to-day, and understand that the landscape will continue to shift over the next decade.

Customised Employment: Designing Work Around the Person

Customised employment is a methodology rather than a formal program — but it deserves specific mention because it has transformed employment outcomes for people who would previously have been considered unemployable in the open market.

The core principle is that standard job descriptions are designed for neurotypical workers with a full range of competencies. Many people with disability have specific, genuine strengths in a subset of tasks but cannot perform the full role as written. Customised employment involves working with an employer to identify unmet business needs that align with the individual's specific capabilities, then creating a custom role — sometimes called "job carving" — that addresses those needs.

For example: a person who cannot handle customer interaction but has exceptional attention to detail and enjoys repetitive tasks might take on a custom role in a retail or warehouse setting that involves inventory management, stock sorting, or quality checking — tasks the employer needs done but hadn't assigned because they were distributed across other roles.

Customised employment works best when:

• An experienced employment consultant facilitates the employer negotiation
• The person's specific strengths have been clearly identified (through assessment and direct observation)
• The employer has genuinely unmet needs that match those strengths
• Ongoing job coaching support is available through DES or NDIS funding

The Ticket to Work initiative is a national program that uses this customised, relationship-based approach. Research from the Centre for Social Impact shows that participating in Ticket to Work substantially increases the likelihood of paid employment compared to standard DES pathways.

Ticket to Work: The School-Based Employment Pathway

Ticket to Work is worth separate mention because it operates during the school years, not after. It is a national initiative that uses a place-based, relationship-driven model to build employment pathways for students with disability before they leave school.

The Ticket to Work approach brings together schools, SLES providers, DES providers, and local employers — with a local intermediary facilitating the connections. Students gain structured work experience in real workplaces, with job coach support. Employers who participate in the program develop relationships with students over time, which often leads to ongoing paid employment after school.

The evidence is strong. NDIS participants who engaged in Ticket to Work before school completion were significantly more likely to be in paid employment two years post-school than those who didn't. If your child's school is connected to a local Ticket to Work initiative, this should be a priority. If not, ask whether your SLES provider has employer relationships that could deliver the same model.

The "Polished Pathway" Problem

Inclusion Australia coined the term "Polished Pathway" to describe a phenomenon that parents in the disability community recognise immediately: the subtle but persistent institutional pressure to funnel students with disability toward segregated day programs or ADEs, rather than supporting them into open employment.

The polished pathway looks reasonable on paper. It is presented as the "safe" option, the "realistic" option, the "right fit" option. The school, the NDIS planner, and sometimes the DES provider may all steer toward it — not from malice but because it's the path of least administrative resistance. Building an open employment pathway requires sustained effort from multiple parties.

Families who want to resist this default need to be explicit about employment goals — in writing, in NDIS plans, in ITP documents, and in every planning meeting. The goal should be stated specifically: "We are working toward open employment in [general sector]. The immediate priority is structured work experience in at least three different industry settings before school finishes."

The Australia Post-Secondary Transition Roadmap includes templates for writing employment goals into NDIS plans and ITP documents in language that explicitly counters institutional default pathways, ensuring the goal of open employment is on record and accountable.

Matching the Pathway to the Person

No single employment pathway is right for everyone, and the goal of this guide is not to suggest that open employment is the only valid outcome. Some young people genuinely thrive in supported employment environments, particularly where the ADE model is well-run and person-centred.

What matters is that the pathway chosen reflects the young person's own goals and capabilities — tested through real experience, not assumed through diagnosis — and that families have made an active, informed decision rather than accepting the default.

The employment planning conversations need to start in Year 9 or 10, not after graduation. By then, work experience has been accumulated, strengths have been identified, and the NDIS plan has been aligned with genuine vocational goals. What happens in the final two years of school determines the range of options available after it.

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