The Decreasing Literacy Skills of the Workforce – Changing Responsibilities of Business Training Programs

In 2001, the American Management Association found that one-third of job applicants flunked basic literacy and math tests.  There is plenty of evidence that literacy skills continue to decline. U.S. government data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that after years of educational reforms, high school seniors scored worse on a national reading test than they had back in 1992. Less than three-quarters of U.S. 12th graders scored at at least the “basic” level, down from 80% in the early 1990s.  Some technology advocates, like William Crossman, author of “VIVO (Voice-In/Voice-Out): The Coming Age of Talking Computers,” aren’t concerned about this loss of literacy. Crossman says, “Just as the car replaced the horse and wagon, speech and graphics and video streaming over the Internet will replace written texts, and talking computers will replace text-driven computers.” This optimistic prediction isn’t borne out in most workplace environments, where most computer equipment is years old. And anyone who has tried speech recognition systems knows that they have a long way to go. Employers view reading and writing as critical basic skills, yet they are often at a loss about how to improve those skills among their workforce without incurring huge costs and loss of on-the-job time. Training programs abound to train managers and staff about project and budget control and various technical disciplines, but few programs exist to teach basic skills and employers find it difficult to justify such expenditures.  The Center for Lifelong Learning was created to address these and other pressing literacy issues.  We believe that the problem of the decline in literacy is exacerbated by the fact that nearly everyone is taught to read using techniques that modern education and brain researchers have proven to be antiquated. Since the beginning of mass education in the U.S., students have been taught to read, starting in Kindergarten, in ways that have been shown to be the opposite of the way our brains work.  Ever gotten drowsy while you read? Ever lost your place and spent many minutes trying to find it, then forgetting what you read? Ever suddenly become aware that you have no idea what you have read for the last few pages? Ever finished a book and 15 minutes later have little idea what it was about? Remember being told by your 1st and 2nd grade teachers that the slower you read the more you will remember? But don’t you get sleepier the slower you read?  Most people attribute their reading problems to their own failings as students. Yet the problem is really the techniques they were taught to use, not their brain and its native capabilities.  Researchers have found that the reality is that the faster you read, the more you remember. It’s the way our brains are designed. In school, kids are taught to read one word at a time, to stop reading at the end of a line until they reach the left side of the page again, and, worst of all, to say the words out loud in their head. All of these practices are exactly the opposite of the reality of the way our brains want information delivered. The last few years have yielded some studies with profound implications about the way we read. Learning the skills taught in many speed reading programs that stimulate thinking and learning affect the brain. Expanding your vision to take in more than one word at a time actually retrains key parts of your brain. A study published in September 2006 by Harvard and Princeton investigators reported that that reading faster and thinking faster made the subjects "happier, more energetic, more creative, more powerful." And you remember more. Other studies show that stimulating your brain with these kinds of programs can even prevent your brain from succumbing to the pathological effects of Alzheimer’s Disease.  Case in point: Executives of the training program of a major U.S. airline were recently trained in our 12-hour, 2-day speed reading workshop. After a review of the reading issues and problems they faced, they took an initial reading test. They all came in reading between 145 and 205 words per minute - very slow – with average comprehension.  They, like nearly all employees, managers, and executives, expressed frustration at the voluminous amount of reading they have and how far behind they constantly feel. The next step in the workshop was to systematically replace old reading behaviors with new ones. First they practice using a pacer. When we read, our eyes move with a jerky motion, causing us to loose our place and our concentration. It turns out that our eyes evolved to follow moving objects and do so very smoothly and efficiently.  In Speed Reading, everyone uses their pen to underline while they read. Just using a pacer like the tip of your pen – the moving object that allows your eyes to move smoothly - will double reading speed. This technique stops the inefficient and frustrating one-word-at-a-time reading and replaces it with peripheral vision reading, taking in 3 to 6 words at a time. After 21 days of practice, the student no longer requires the pacer because a new behavior and habit have been formed and they own it for a lifetime.  Over lunch, the head of HR said, “I came in a skeptic, but I am leaving a believer. I can really feel it happening." The CLO said "I am going to use this right away to get through a stack of 40 trade publications on my desk I've been putting off." She will get through that stack in about 45 minutes to an hour. Even decades of inefficient habits and behaviors can be changed in a relatively short time – if the participant is willing. They continued their practice for the rest of the afternoon, learning how to break the sentence into different sized chunks and getting comfortable at seeing words and knowing what they mean without saying them aloud in your head (When you approach a STOP sign, you don’t say “stop” in your head before reacting, do you?). Their practice continued the next day with all the pieces they learned coming together in an end-to-end reproducible process that they can customize for every book they read.  At the end of the second 6-hour day, the slowest reader who came in at 145 words per minute tested at 634 wpm at 76 percent comprehension, more than 4 times her original reading speed. Her comprehension will steadily increase over the subsequent 21 day, 15-minutes per day practice plan. The second slowest reader of the group, coming in at 147 wpm, tested the fastest of the group at 928 wpm at the end of the second day (and he had to miss the afternoon of the first day) at 76 percent comprehension. The table below gives the entire groups’ scores. Initial Reading Speed | Final Reading Speed | Percent Increase 1 145 634 437% 2 147 928 631% 3 180 807 448% 4 185 809 437% 5 190 798 420% 6 205 568 277% 7 218 500 229% Major U.S. Airline Speed Reading Training, October 2007   (© 2007 Center for Lifelong Learning)   Following their 15 minutes a day practice for 21 days after the workshop, they become efficient at their new skills with comprehension increasing constantly. After 42 days of practice, they can become proficient.  Two serious problems exist concurrently for training managers regarding the literacy and communication skills of management and the workforce. First, more and more job applicants have serious literacy and communication deficiencies. Secondly, most excellent students and even experienced VPs or CEOs have inferior reading skills that are not adequate to support the increased literacy demands of the modern workplace. Average college graduate in US Average reading speed  | Average comprehension Basic reading material 250 wpm 72 percent Semi-tough material 150 wpm 62 percent Tough Material 100 wpm 50 percent Average reading speed of U.S. college graduates (© 2007 Center for Lifelong Learning) Even though eighty-five percent of companies that test applicants say they do not hire skills-deficient applicants , even qualified applicants and highly sought-after executives are feeling information overload and experiencing at least a 30 percent drop in productivity since the Internet dominated the workplace. They are reading with outdated, inefficient techniques that are unchanged since the first grade. While not necessarily fair, the burden is squarely on the workplace training managers to help their employees acquire these skills, since few schools are stepping up to the plate. Those that do will likely experience a measurable competitive advantage affecting the company’s bottom line.   2009-04-15T04:44:23Z

-9.0819

233 4184

true

1480

the-decreasing-literacy-skills-of-the-workforce-changing-responsibilities-of-business-training-programs

2009-04-17T07:19:45Z

2009-04-17T07:19:49Z

Employers are finding that the ability to write clearly, concisely and correctly among their workforce is becoming a rarer and rarer skill. And nearly everyone in the workplace is frustrated at how slowly they read and how little they remember.

The Decreasing Literacy Skills of the Workforce – Changing Responsibilities of Business Training Programs

2009-04-17T07:19:50Z