Our skills may be out of touch but PR proves the real winner
Whenever I filled those in, I would find a position barely a notch above bubonic plague.I would, on the other hand, find that I’m a self-starter, but if there’s none of the opposite sex around, you have to be a self-starter. And before someone gets shirty with me, when I was growing up, magazines didn’t offer tests to establish that you were a knockout with your own sex. I probably wouldn’t have done well on them, either.
It wasn’t a costly addiction, because I never bought the magazines. Most of the time, I’d be doing the quizzes in doctors’ waiting rooms or waiting for the dye to take in the hairdressers. The disadvantage was that, half the time, I didn’t get to the end of the interrogation. I’d be halfway through when the magazine was snatched from my hands, so I was never sure how bad I was at flirting, budgeting, dieting, or cleaning the house. I knew I was bad, but not how bad.
This weekend, the thing to measure yourself against was a list of skills that used to be essential but were no longer relevant, together with a list agreed by the majority of respondents as vital for today.
The least important (since it came in at number 20) of the old skills was “knowing how to spell long words.” That floored me a bit. I don’t know how to spell many challenging words, but I have a good eye. I can go through several possibilities and come up with the right one. Bit like those people who say they don’t know much about art but they know what they like, I know which version of antidisestablishmentarianism is the correct one. This write-out-and-decide approach is more time-consuming than my husband’s approach. Call out a word or a name and he stands up there like a schoolboy of advanced years and takes on the challenge. You should hear him do Mississippi, it’s just a joy. But the two of us are equally effective in the long term. Now, you will say that because of computer spellcheck, nobody needs to know how to spell long words any longer, but if you say that, I will tell you that it’s the short words that’ll screw you. “To” for “too” or “two” can turn a simple sentence into a contradiction in terms.
Going through the list, I found it oddly consoling to learn how few of the old-style skills I ever had. Never knew how to change a tyre. Still don’t. My mother regarded tyre-changing as a sort of gateway skill admitting women to all of the filthy jobs competence in which would not advance their lives in any way, and my mother was no dozer.
Other skills of yesteryear (although the poll didn’t specify how yester was the year) were “neat handwriting” (never had, never will, that’s why God invented the qwerty keyboard) “Polishing the brass/silver” (made sure those around me decided early on that I was useless at polishing, so I never had to do it) “writing postcards” (this is a skill?) and “putting up a tent.” That tent erection is included in essential out-of-date skills is a bit puzzling. Other than girl guides and boy scouts, nobody, in my early life did anything but avoid tent erection. Most of us avoided boy scouts and girl guides, too. Be honest. How often has an up close and personal encounter with a tent peg or a toggle improved any of our lives? These days, however, every second person you meet is into camping and nobody would survive a music festival without tent erection stills. So tent skills are more essential these days than ever and should not have been left off the modern list.
I began to develop doubts about this research due south of the tents and just north of the darning. Nobody, according to this poll, needs to be able to darn or knit. Are the researchers kidding? Haven’t they heard of New Poverty? Darning is a highly relevant current skill. As is making your own briquettes out of old newspapers, but does that figure in their line-up of currently essential skills? Nope. Instead, they have idiotic stuff, such as “re-heating food in the microwave”.
Ah, lads. Ah, come on. The scientist who came up with microwaves did it in the 40s. They were commercially available in the 1960s. Their sales passed out those of conventional ovens in the 70s. For more than 30 years, we have been loading our lightly covered dinners into microwaves and pushing the button. The promotion of this to a skill is a bit of a reach, as is the promotion of using a sat nav to a skill. If I could find all the bits of my sat nav from under the passenger seat, I’d be happy to demonstrate how minimal is the skill required to follow the instructions delivered by the sat nav female voice. Once you can turn left now in a car, you don’t have to learn how to do it with extra finesse when obeying the disembodied voice.
I was beginning to suspect that this survey had been done to hammer home the virtues of Facebook (of which there are none, and stop stalking me, you tiresome photograph-uploaders, I’m not going to look at your rotten holiday snaps) or Google, because they figure in so many of the allegedly essential current skills, when I got distracted by Skill Number 15: touch-typing. Now, this one I really liked. Learning to touch-type was one of the highlights of my sad life. It’s one of those skills that saves you time every day. Watching people who can’t touch-type writing a lengthy document is like watching someone training for Strictly Come Dancing wearing wellies; it has slight novelty value in the beginning but quickly palls.
But the thing is this. In the past, touch-typing was a given. In girls’ schools in the past, those who didn’t get lucky enough to go to university went to secretarial school where they learned to touch-type.
Yet touch-typing does not figure at all on the ‘old skills’ list of this research, while it does appear on the list of skills currently essential. How odd. How very odd. Or not odd at all when it emerges that the company that carried out the poll are in the business of....? Right. Online touch typing tutorials.
It’s one of the oldest PR tricks in the book, the opinion poll which just happens to raise awareness of the product or service provided by the company that commissioned it. And, no matter how sophisticated we kid ourselves we are about consuming media, it works. It works, every single time.
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