The good news? Young people entering the job market today are very technically savvy.
The bad news? Their writing skills are the SUXX0R.
In a survey of 100 human resources executives, only 5 percent said that recent college graduates lacked computer or technology skills, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm.
The problem now is more basic. Nearly half the executives said that entry-level workers lacked writing skills, and 27 percent said that they were deficient in critical thinking.
It seems that some young employees are now guilty of the technological equivalent of wearing flip-flops: they are writing company e-mail as if they were texting cellphone messages with their thumbs.
22 view(s)
My music major son and I were talking about this yesterday. I told him that from 1611 to the beginning of the mass media age the English language had been pretty much anchored to the King James bible. People would congregate and hear someone read from a book that never changed so change in the language itself was by generations rather than by years or weeks.
Of course that’s gone by the wayside and media instantly transports the latest in language. We recalled an episode of Star Trek where the captain and Spock visited Earth in the 1960’s and how improbable it was that they’d be able to handle idiomatic American English from 300 years earlier. My son wondered if English might evolve into a super-compact text-speak syntax by then.
Aaahhggh! This is one of my pet peeves – one of my clients communicates by email. It’s like corresponding with an AOL chat teen.
Another client also sends requests by email – she believes in using all the keys on her keyboard whether they are approprate punctuation or not. She is a creative person and has made up her own text decorations.
It’s like getting mash notes from that girl in 7th grade that drew hearts and stars over all the lower-case “i” characters.
I think DOF’s son will probably turn out to be right.