Dyslexia occurs in around 10% of the population, and so a significant proportion of a company’s employees, customers and clients may be affected by dyslexia. Dyslexia can have both positive and negative effects on performance in the workplace.
Dyslexia can affect performance in the workplace positively. The skills and abilities of dyslexic people are usually greater than their difficulties, and their problems often mask their abilities. Having to work hard to overcome learning difficulties often leads to dyslexic people being highly motivated and diligent.
Dyslexic people often have a unique skills set, and are often creative and imaginative, innovative and lateral thinkers, resourceful, determined to succeed, intuitive with good interpersonal skills and have good spatial skills.
Dyslexia can affect performance in the workplace negatively in the following areas:
• Combined listening and writing, including difficulty with notetaking
• Spelling
• Reading aloud
• Organising thoughts on paper
• Needing to redraft a document more than once
• Memory difficulties
• Focus and concentration problems
• Interpreting and relaying information
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