This CNet article describes what corporate America wants from its workforce. Surprise--it's not necessarily tech-savvy youths with oversize thumbs from playing video games and keying text messages on cellphones the size of chiclets.
What corporate America wants is workers who can read and write--especially writing. Our kids are growing up and entering the workforce without the vaguest notion of how to compose a complete, grammatically correct sentence, and it's driving bosses everywhere crazy.
Email is a particular problem, as the informal style of email messages has encouraged ever more casual communication, to the point of being incomprehensible, if you look at the examples of corporate "writing" included in the article.
This reinforces the article I mentioned a couple of days ago about the study that showed that kids that spend a lot of time on the computer are dumber. Playing video games, typing code in instant messenger (r u ther, lol), and surfing the Web is not preparing our kids for the workforce.
Step one is for parents and educators to take control and stop repeating the fallacy that, "Our kids know a lot more about technology than we do." The fact that my daughter can rack up a much higher score on Super Mario Brothers does not make her smarter or more tech savvy than me. Nor do high scores on video games or the ability to send text messages on cellphones prepare them to enter the Knowledge Economy workforce.
How well do the schools in your community do in preparing your youth for the Knowledge Economy? Is there a concerted effort to make sure they can read and write at appropriate grade levels. Are you holding regular meetings with economic developers, local business leaders, and school administrators to make sure the schools are emphasizing the right stuff?