Noemí Selfín spent 16 years outside the workforce. An aggressive cancer, the treatment that followed, and the disability it left behind had pulled her out of professional life at an age when most careers are still building momentum. When she decided to return, she was 52, and she understood immediately that a conventional resume would not be enough. Her story reflects a structural tension at the heart of the Spanish labor market: a chronic shortage of qualified digital talent on one side, and a large population of workers with disabilities struggling to access employment on the other.
Retraining as the Only Viable Path Forward
Selfín enrolled in one of the intensive technology training programs driven by Eurofirms Foundation, a four-month online bootcamp she attended each evening after her working day. The format - demanding, structured, and fully remote - was designed for people who could not pause their lives entirely to retrain. She completed it and today works as a consultant at Salesforce.
Her path is one of more than 400 taken by participants across 12 tech cohorts launched by the foundation during 2025 alone. The labor insertion rate reached 75%, a figure that stands in sharp contrast to the broader employment landscape for people with disabilities in Spain. According to data referenced at the foundation's annual gathering, the employment rate for people with recognized disabilities aged 16 to 64 reached 32.8% in 2025 - up just over two percentage points from the previous year, but still far below the 74.1% rate recorded for the population without disabilities. The gap represents not a marginal difference but a structural fault line.
Spanish law requires companies with more than 50 employees to reserve at least 2% of their workforce for people with recognized disabilities. Yet union estimates suggest that close to 43% of Catalan companies fail to meet this quota or the alternative measures the regulations permit. Compliance, where it exists, often reflects legal obligation rather than inclusive culture - a distinction that matters enormously to the people affected.
The Invisible Weight That Statistics Cannot Capture
Beyond the employment gap lies a harder-to-measure problem: the prevalence of invisible disability - chronic illness, mental health conditions, neurodiversity, and other non-visible impairments that workers routinely conceal out of fear of discrimination or professional marginalisation. Selfín recalls being advised at a public employment service to omit her disability from her resume entirely. She followed the advice. "It makes you feel that, in addition to your age and being a woman, you have another handicap," she said.
The pressure to hide is not incidental. It reflects a corporate culture in which disclosure is still perceived - by many workers - as a risk rather than a right. Large technology companies have begun to address this through structured programs. At NTT Data, internal efforts focus on building environments where, as one senior figure put it, "people feel safe to show themselves as they are," acknowledging that the dominant barriers are cultural rather than physical. Accenture, for its part, is working toward the legal 2% quota across all group companies while promoting what it describes as "self-declaration" policies and barrier-free environments to encourage workers to come forward about disabilities or neurodiversity without fear of consequence.
Selfín now takes a different view of her own situation, though she does not minimize what it cost her to reach it. "Now I am like a soldier," she says - working precisely to avoid being defined by her condition, aware that the psychological weight does not disappear but can be managed differently as professional security grows. "If there is no opportunity, you will always be thinking about it and the fear will not go away."
Building Environments Where Disclosure Does Not Mean Disadvantage
The Iguales program of Eurofirms Foundation addresses this problem directly, working with companies to surface invisible disabilities and build the internal conditions under which workers no longer feel compelled to hide them. The approach is less about individual accommodation and more about reshaping the ambient culture of organizations - the informal norms, attitudes, and assumptions that determine whether disclosure is safe.
These questions framed much of the third edition of La Bravíssima 2026, held this June in S'Agaró and attended by more than 275 representatives from business, civil society, and public institutions. The proceeds from the event are directed toward technology training programs for women with disabilities - closing a loop between the cultural conversation and the practical infrastructure needed to support it.
The underlying argument is straightforward: technical skills reduce the leverage that stigma holds over a professional identity. "Now, after doing the bootcamp, I feel that the stronger your resume is, the less important your disability is," Selfín explains. That equation does not dissolve discrimination, but it alters the balance of power in a market where, for too long, the absence of credentials and the presence of a disability have compounded each other into near-invisibility.
