The Typing Gap Emerges
In our technology-driven world, fast and accurate typing is becoming an indispensable skill for productivity and success. Yet the latest surveys reveal an alarming trend among students. When polled, only 60% reported being able to touch type without looking at the keyboard. This means 2 out of 5 students rely on slower and more error-prone “hunt and peck” methods.
Why Touch Typing Matters
Reliance on visually searching keys inherently disrupts focus, causes fatigue quicker, and cripples typing efficiency. Consider the impacts for common jobs: engineers using modeling software lose design time, analysts entering data introduce mistakes, writers lose train of thought. Even basic email replies lag.
The Inequality Effect
Over a career, small gaps in capability cascade into major consequences. Workers who touch type fluidly can accomplish far more in less time with greater enjoyment. Those losing time or energy on keyboarding face mounting frustration and opportunities lost. All else being equal in skill, outlooks diverge enormously based solely on typing fluency alone.
Seeds Sown Early On
Unfortunately, the prime years for wiring touch typing neural circuitry easily expire before college. Students already struggling to type efficiently find poor habits increasingly hard-baked by graduation. We risk entire careers limited by insufficient foundations, despite being firmly within a digital economy.
While interviewing students at the University Of Central Florida the following striking numbers were discovered:
1) Many students (> 75 %) of ages 19 – 22 y.o. have only basic typing skills, while demonstrating minimal typing rate of 30 – 40 Words Per Minute.
2) Less than 60 % of respondents reported that they can touch type.
3) Only the ones who have mastered 10-finger typing between the ages of 8 to 12 years old court reach fast typing rates (65-120 WPM).
Obtained information leads us to a conclusion, that yearly learning of the ten-finger typing (or touch typing) is essential for becoming good typists later in life (f.e. in college, under the pressure to type more).
Another insight: there is no reason to worry about the speed of typing in school, as long as students have mastered ten-finger layout – they will become fast typists on their own later on.
The plan for the Future:
The plan : is to continue the study and to find out the following answers:
1) There is data on the web about general distribution of the typing rate:
Based on this data, less than 30 % of people who use computers, of all ages, can type faster than 40 WPM and less than 10 % can type faster than 50 WPM. This data does not contradict our numbers gathered among the UCF students, and thus can be used to support conclusions above.
Now the following questions are yet to be answered:
1) How many of those people can touch type?
2) How many people have learnt 10-finger typing at a young age ( 8 – 12 y.o.)?
3) How many people will succeed in life?
4) How many of those people are happy about their life at the moment?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
So here’s the deal – it turns out a surprising 40% of students these days can’t touch type! My jaw dropped too. With how digital daily life is, you’d think schools would be drilling typing practice hardcore by now.
Unfortunately not – and it’s starting to hold back tons of young professionals. Just ask my buddy Julia who does financial analysis. She loses WAY too much headspace hunting for keys instead of crunching the real numbers. Had to downgrade her forecasting skills at the last performance review!
Same goes for writers, coders, even sales folks like yours truly emailing clients…you name it. Today’s work is keyboard-based. If your typing skills lag, so does your career – it’s that simple.
But relax, these are fixable problems, people! Let’s get school districts investing in typing training sooner. My teenage niece breezed through a touch typing class online and by graduation will be lapping older co-workers. And for those already employed, maybe some office typing seminars?
Boosting typing speeds here in 2023 could do wonders keeping talent competitive. Because like the old saying goes – the early bird catches the worm. Only nowadays, it should be the early TYPIST catches the worm!
You could say the trusty keyboard is the boomerang of the digital age – no matter how far technology evolves, it keeps circling back to find itself in front of us. Just when we predict voice commands, touch screens and predictive text finally making keyboards obsolete, we inevitably find ourselves drawn back to tactile keys and rapid typing.
Much like how the handy bent-wood tool kept finding indigenous Australian hunters’ hands despite alternatives, keyboards remain central to modern work because of their precision, familiarity and sheer presence – with over 1.2 billion mechanical models matching cars globally! So don’t be quick to toss out your keyboard yet. As long as computers reign, their stalwart input sidekick stays firmly lodged in our workflows for the long haul.
