Increasingly, we are finding that clients are coming to us with specific needs in mind. For instance, a pharmaceutical company needed its audit staff to improve their skills in Technical Report Writing, following tight corporate guidelines.

We worked with senior managers to improve such skills by designing one-day workshops, which were then successfully rolled out over subsequent weeks to the staff involved. The workshops were co-presented, requiring painstaking preparation and close collaboration. The results, which included the publication of a style manual, were deemed well worth the work involved.

To be effective, such workshops are ideally based on real examples drawn from recent, existing documents.The best exercises are conducted in groups, giving delegates the opportunity to critique the reports and then set to work improving their structure, content and style.

We were also called on to deliver 5 Dynamic Reading Skills events for a client in Ireland. Few people realize how their reading speeds and comprehension of a text can routinely increase by more than 30% - and in some cases much more - once fresh and easily learned skills are understood and intensively practised. By embedding new habits, readers can make huge time-savings that would be eagerly seized with both hands in any other sphere of business life.

We all accept that saving time means saving money. Unfortunately, many people still read business text at a rate marginally faster than a hearse. They are losing out, wasting time, and in the process wasting their employers' money.

For those reading this, the first hurdle to leap is opening your eyes to the fact that most people read all text, regardless of comparative difficulty, at exactly the same speed. That is akin to travelling at 30mph down a motorway! The key is to vary your speed according to the difficulty of the text you're reading.