In choosing employment the undiagnosed dyslexic is very likely to focus on roles that are supported by their cognitive abilities, and historically undiagnosed dyslexics will have gravitated towards manual process orientated jobs, where they can visualise and extrapolate process.

Over time those roles have taken on greater and greater levels of recording, process documentation and policy provision, so the employee may find that slowly their world begins to alienate them.

Yes dyslexics are able to excel in a range of areas, not just the simple mechanical tasks, and with proper support, they can thrive in your business.

The considerable abilities of dyslexics are often overlooked by employers or managers areas such as their heightened 3-D spatial awareness and problem solving skills.

Look here at the pages listing the famous dyslexics to see just how varied and wide ranging the abilities of the dyslexic are

Dyslexia has the potential to cause difficulties in learning and assimilating information critical to your organisation. Employers need to know who their dyslexics are – and this means that a culture of informed openness is also important. It is important, not just for the mandated DDA perspective, that dyslexics are recognised in the workplace, it actually makes very good business sense!

(The Equality Act of 2010 gives legal protection to employees)

The dyslexic who knows and understands their abilities, is able to contribute far more effectively to your workplace agenda, and can often provide improvement and enhancement to your business.

Making best use of your dyslexic’s skills needs understanding and awareness, not only of how they can help you, but also how you can prevent your systems and processes disabling them and creating inefficiency in your business.

By the time the dyslexic appears in the work place there are likely to have been a number of positive and negative experiences impacting the person’s life, this may manifest itself in the workplace, where if informed you and your managers can resolve the issues quickly and with minimal impact.

So what about the positives? Dyslexics are often very intelligent having IQ’s significantly above the norm. Their speed of decision making and the holistic mental models the dyslexic possesses means that decision making can be very quick almost intuitive, and far quicker than the non-dyslexic.

Each Dyslexic is unique because they are a mix of results from a combination of an underlying talent, or predisposition, from environmental influences and unsuccessful learning experiences. As a result, no two dyslexics will have exactly the same set of qualities.

Dyslexics also tend to be more curious, creative, and intuitive than average. They tend to be highly aware of the environment, inventive, and good at real world tasks.

Their special mode of thought also produces the gift of mastery: once they have learned something experientially, they understand it on such a deep level that they know how to do things intuitively without thinking about how.

When a Dyslexic forms part of your team it is in your own interest to explore and harness their individual skill set to get the best from them, to minimise the frustrations, and to get the best from them.

It is only by having effective awareness programs in your business, that can you can harness and  reap the very real benefits of having dyslexic employees working for you!