Text-ese

Peter Searle, Adecco

This was part of my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday, last Sunday.

Peter Searle, who heads Britain’s largest and most influential recruitment company, Adecco, has said that social networking has created an underclass of job-seekers who don’t have the basic skills needed to enter the workforce.

I quote his comments because, given what I see and read, they are relevant to Malta too.

Here, even older people who grew up without social networking are undergoing a degeneration of their own communication skills as they spend more and more time online talking nonsense in ‘textese’ via a laptop or smartphone.

Searle said that despite high levels of unemployment, British companies are struggling to fill vacancies because school-leavers are unable to work in a team, turn up on time or communicate with colleagues.

“We have instances in offices where people would rather sit at their desk and send emails to each other next door rather than walk around and have a conversation,” he said.

“They have no respect for their managers. They don’t ask them for advice because it isn’t in their social background to do that. All the things that we think of as normal, they aren’t prepared for.”

He thinks that the heavy use of Twitter and Facebook is much to blame, programming people to have relationships with others primarily via a machine.

“They only know how to interact with short ‘text speak’ to save themselves time, so they start using text speak in conversations. Some businesses have had to send new employees on special courses to ‘de-text’ their speech,” he said. “They come out of school and want to get a job, but the people who are interviewing them say that their personal social skills and technical abilities are not suited to the way things work in industry.”

Searle says that the harsh conditions under which businesses have been operating for the last couple of years have made them not just unwilling but literally unable to take on substandard employees and then invest time and money bringing them up to scratch. “Now the market is saying, ‘Actually, I need you to be running tomorrow because I’m going to go bust otherwise.’ There are no large environments, even in engineering, where you can just hang up your brain as you go inside and go through the day and get paid for it,” he said.

We’re going to be seeing a lot of that here in Malta, and then of course we can always blame the government.

Are Twitter and Facebook entirely to blame, though? I’m not quite sure. I have a distinct recollection of people’s communication and social skills being a lot worse than they are now – if this is at all possible – way back in the dark ages of the Mintoff and KMB years when we had no computers and certainly no internet because it didn’t exist.

I imagine they modelled themselves on what they saw around them, and probably still do.