The Writing Crisis and What it Means to you and your Business

THE PAST
If you are of my generation, you will surely remember the days when businesses and organizations were rife with what we then called secretaries. These secretaries made their bosses look good in almost every way, especially their writing. That's right. These incredible people knew every rule of grammar and punctuation and took great pride in their skills. Often, the boss would hand them a hand-scribbled, unintelligible note to which the secretary waved her magic wand, and voila! There suddenly appeared a grammatically correct, well-written document that impressed colleagues, bosses, customers, and vendors.

THE PRESENT
Today the ability to sustain the salaries of such grammar mavens is gone. We are in an age of extracting the maximum productivity from the fewest possible resources. Thus, ladies and gents, we are on our own to produce the kind of writing that makes us, and our organizations, look credible and professional.

Consider:

$20.83 – the cost for an executive making $100,000 + to read a 10-page document

$1,200 – the cost of a writer to produce a 10-page document

$35 million – the loss incurred by Coleco when they put out an instruction manual that customers could not make sense of and so returned their newly purchased Adam computers

Untold losses in life and money – the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters were based on poor writing and communication

The stories go on ad-infinitum, but the bottom line is that writing is a high ticket item yet a low budget priority in most organizations today.

In addition, I'm sorry to say, the plot thickens.
The plot thickens because most of the existing writing skills in today's workplace are in the hands of those nearing retirement.
Conversely, a recent survey of adult prose skills found that there is a huge pool of labor out there, but that by 2030, 119 million people will have literacy skills below employable levels.
As a point of comparison, that same year the US population is projected to be 360 million.
Using a little interpolation, we're talking about 40% of the available pool will be unemployable.

Here's another one that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy.
Today, the US ranks 16th out of the total 21 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Experts say the issue is the growing disparity between an exploding immigrant population that lacks opportunities for and access to education and those who do have a high school education or above. The line is also drawn because of significant economic disparity between those with and those without at least a high school education. Among OECD countries there is no such labor pool disparity.

THE FUTURE

Now, what does this mean to me, you ask?

First, if you are in business, you are in for a wallop.
Between now and 2014, growth will be 46% for jobs in professional, management, technical and high level sales areas.
If we do the math, that means the labor pool will have exploded, but the requisite skills – as in writing, among others, will not be there.
I think we can safely say that the growth of human capital sufficient to meet the needs of our future business needs portends to be a significant problem.

THE ANSWER

Let me go on record here to say the solution is not simple.
But we already knew that, right?
I see the need for three parties to come together:
government, education, and business.
From government and business we need support and funding, from education we need graduates who have the requisite skills necessary to be competent and productive employees in the multicultural workplace of the future.