Work Skills !

There is something definitely wrong when Australian kids leave school with a certificate testifying that they have reached the required standard of both literacy and numeracy - and the business world finds that they are so deficient that they are unable to meet normal business requirements.

It is not hard to see why this has happened.   Most kids tend to straddle what could be called " the school world " and the " real world "  which is their everyday life, and that involves texting when they send a message and using a calculator when they need to move numbers.  That old skill of putting words together to form a sentence and doing basic arithmetic in your head is no longer relevant.

In fact, texting jargon has so developed that it has become really a dialect amongst younger people and often it is completely incomprehensible to older folk.  Where traditional English is required in the business world that is akin to using a foreign language.  The abbreviated form is so ingrained that it is the automated response to all forms of communication.

It is frustrating to employers when they find new people lacking the ability to make simple calculations - without electronic help, but the need for such mental ability has disappeared in the education world.  Students have a laptop computer or a tablet containing a calculator and that becomes the means of moving numbers.   Once that habit has formed, it is an automatic response.

In a distant age those lacking in numeracy and the correct use of grammar were destined to toil in unskilled labouring jobs.  It was the brighter kids who went in to the professions or got apprenticed to learn a trade skill, but in today's world low skilled work is in very short supply.  We now have jobs going begging - and at the same time a vast pool of unemployed young people.

Industry is finding it necessary to provide in-house training to bring new people up to standard, or in many cases accept their deficiencies and channel their work through a filter of more skilled minds to achieve an acceptable standard.  That delivers an increase in business costs and we now live in an  unbelievably competitive world.

It seems inevitable that artificial intelligence will inject the skill upgrade that today's young people need.  The day has arrived when we recognise that we are destined to live with a Smarten in our hand at all times, and that has the capacity to deliver both a calculator and the ability to both understand the type of industry we work in and put together a communication in basic English when we tell it what we need to deliver - in our own condensed format.

Artificial intelligence increases annually in huge leaps and bounds.  We already have spell-check and a thesaurus incorporated in computer programmes to bring our work up to standard and it will not be a difficult extension for the memory function to act as an " interpreter " between what serves as the "  dialect "  of the young and the needs of the business world.

Useful as artificial intelligence may be, those schools which continue to turn out young people with the skill to construct a report in logical business English and who have the ability to do basic mathematics without the need of a calculator will still be first in line when it comes to job placement.