This latest idea has been a gripe of mine for a while. Why don’t all businesses encourage, insentivise and ensure efficiency through making sure all staff can TOUCH TYPE!!!

It is surely the most obvious thing you can make any desk based (or at least staff regularly using keyboards) member of staff do to get them working faster. If you could type 20%? 30%? 50% faster? How would that save you money. Surely if someone is touch typing rather than plod typing (my abusive term for slow typists!!) they would be so much more efficient. Say they type 20% of their day. 20% of 20% is 4%. If even 25% of your staff were typing then you could make your company 1% more efficient.

1% may not sound like a lot but that is off the top end and will repeat each year and hopefully will increase as people get better.

Another factor is that people who can touch type are much more likely to learn other time saving skills on the computer. I will probably go on about keyboard shortcut in another post (rant!!).

Manchester Police have announced massive cuts today. If all their officers could process documents 25% faster this would be negated in one small way (if they only had to fill out reports once rather than up to 6+ times it would help more but that is another matter).

I am tempted to get people in Essex doing this with lessons by inviting people to bring their laptops to a room where I sit in front and literally put paper over their hands and tell them to type. After all that is the way I learnt.

I also raised this with 2 Headteachers in secondary schools over the summer. I had a false opinion that every kid could touch type now as they have grown up with computers, wrong. If they could type twice as fast, how much more homework could they do and therefore learn?

It took me 5 minutes to write this blog post with edits. How long would it take someone bad at typing?