About ND Works
ND Works has a slightly unusual family tree.
When Kate Lynn’s daughter needed help with auditory processing, Kate did what she has since learned is a fairly recognizable feature of her own neurodivergent brain: she hyperfocused. She learned everything she could, found the people doing interesting work, and eventually built Sound Sense, the first audiology practice we’re aware of created specifically around the auditory processing challenges of neurodivergent children and adults.
The practice opened with children in mind. Working adults showed up almost immediately.
They had spent years trying harder to hear, follow conversations, keep up in meetings, work around noise, and compensate for what they missed. Sometimes sophisticated hearing technology made an enormous difference. Sometimes the answer involved changing the environment, the tools, or one maddeningly small part of how the work got done.
That way of looking at problems stuck.
And the kids grew up.
Over the years, Sound Sense worked with thousands of neurodivergent people and their families. The children became teenagers and adults. The questions that had once been about getting through school became questions about college, first jobs, managers, careers, burnout, independence, and making a living.
Kate had spent much of her own career on the other side of those questions. She recruited in healthcare and technology, hired people, built businesses, consulted with companies, sold things for a living, and changed careers often enough to acquire a suspiciously useful collection of skills along the way.
She was also late-identified herself. In retrospect, that put some of her own fairly improbable work history, including the hyperfocus that helped create Sound Sense and ND Works, in a different light. It also made her even more interested in the gap between what someone can do and the conditions under which they can actually sustain it.
By the time Kate retired from audiology, helping people figure out sustainable work had become a substantial part of what we did.
That became ND Works.
What we brought with us
ND Works brought together validated assessments, career research, hiring knowledge, practical tools, and expertise from several different professional worlds. It also draws on nearly 4,000 conversations with neurodivergent children, adults, and families over many years.
That long view matters.
We’ve seen the right tool change something that years of trying harder couldn’t. We’ve seen people who can do extraordinarily difficult work get flattened by something everyone around them considers easy. We’ve seen jobs that looked perfect on paper become unsustainable, and unlikely ones work beautifully.
So we pay attention to the specifics.
What does this job actually require? What happens under different conditions? What is taking far more effort than it should? What is this person unusually good at? Is there a tool, skill, accommodation, different environment, different job, or occasionally ridiculously simple workaround that changes the equation?
The goal is paid work that makes sense for your brain and your life.
More brains are involved
Some ND Works clients work 1:1. Some work in small groups. Many do both.
Groups bring more brains to the problem: other neurodivergent adults with different work histories, people who have already run into something you’re encountering now, and experts who know particular parts of the territory.
But ND Works itself also involves more than one person or one profession.
Depending on what someone needs, we work with and draw on expertise from physicians (MDs), advanced-practice nurses, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, licensed mental health professionals, career and recruiting professionals, and others with specialized experience in neurodivergence, disability, work, and adult functioning.
Student and professional interns are part of ND Works too.
We know what we know. We also know when someone else needs to be in the room.
Sometimes that means consulting with another professional. Sometimes it means working alongside someone who already knows the client well. And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is recognize that someone else has exactly the expertise this situation needs.