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The Way to Better Jobs

By LYLE M. SPENCER

Mr. Spencer is president of Science Research Associates. One of the activities of this Chicago-based organization is training students — and teachers — in the techniques of faster and better reading. In this article he explains the vital part reading plays in business advancement.

You may not see any headlines about it, but the biggest news in business today is the great switch-over from brawn jobs to brain jobs — the fast-growing White Collar Boom. The labor market is shifting from blue-shirt employees with strong backs to skilled craftsmen and mental workers.

Whether you are a young man looking for your first job or a seasoned wage-earner, it is time to take a look into the years ahead and see how you fit into this very real "revolution."

First off, what's at the root of the White Collar Boom? Very simply, it's Automation, that wondrous new word that is cropping up more and more often in newspapers and magazines. Electronic machines will gradually take over the monotonous assembly-line chores that semi-skilled and unskilled workers are performing.

A whole new field of thinking, know-how jobs will be created — the great need will be for men who can manage the machines, or do work too complicated for the machines. Wilbur F. Murra, of the National Education Association, recently warned a convention of that society that "educated manpower" equipped for the era of automation is in critically short supply.

What this means to you, the wage-earner, is very plain: in the coming years, education and training will be more vital than ever before. In simplest terms, it is the reading man who will reap the profit of this new era.

The ability to read is the most important mental skill we ever learn. When you were in school, about 90 percent of everything you learned came through reading, and the pattern is not much different in the job world. Teachers say that the commonest cause of failure in school is lack of ability to read rapidly and intelligently.

Out in the job world, alert businessmen are becoming con­scious of reading skill.  One personnel manager put it this way:

 "Automation is taking hold rapidly in factories and mills, and we're beginning to see electronic computing machines in many offices. These cost-saving machines make possible stead­ily rising wages for all of us.

"Biggest bottlenecks now are the minds of men who haven't increased their ability to read and absorb the new information that's essential to handling complicated jobs."

Make no mistake that only the blue-shirters need to wake up to the new emphasis on reading. It's also important to workers who already have white-collar jobs. A company presi­dent who had just installed a reading-improvement course for his administrative personnel has something to say about executives as well:

"The best executives, I'm convinced, are the ones who are able to maintain a broad outlook and perspective on our business. That's why I insist that our top management people continue to read widely in areas outside their own fields."

But in the face of this growing new challenge, the bitter truth is that most adults read with appalling inefficiency. Most of us stopped learning the skill of reading somewhere between third and sixth grades, just when we were really beginning to get the hang of it. And far too many of us lost the habit of serious reading to improve our minds soon after we slammed our schoolbooks shut for the last time.

Thus, when he does read, the average adult stumbles along at a rate of between 200 and 250 words a minute on an easy-to-read article like this one, with his mind absorbing only 50 to 60 percent of the ideas the text contains. With a little train­ing, an adult with ordinary intelligence can learn to read mate­rial of medium difficulty at from 450 to 600 words per minute and understand 80 to 90 percent of it.

Latest figures from the U.S. Labor Department summarize the mental-skill revolution now occurring in our country. Over-all employment rose 10 percent from 1950 to 1961. A breakdown into job categories shows that the areas growing fastest are largely the ones requiring a considerable formal education. These are also the fields where technological and scientific changes are occurring so rapidly that successful job holders must keep pace through regular reading and study.

To take a few examples, during this period professional and technical jobs mushroomed by 78 percent and clerical jobs by 30 percent. Sales workers increased by 18 percent, owners and managers by 14 percent, but jobs for foremen and skilled laborers grew by only 7 percent, and the demand for semi­skilled workers declined by 7 percent, while jobs for unskilled labor decreased by 10 percent.

The growth in good job opportunities is by no means limited to people who have been to college. Many of the most exciting fields are open to men and women with only a high-school education who obtain some additional specialized train­ing. The supply of operator and programmer jobs in electronic data processing seems virtually unlimited, and many thousands of aerospace technicians' jobs will be created all through the 1960s.

Many of the most interesting growth fields range up from the skilled clerical and craftsmanship jobs to what are called the "semi-professions," key assistants to top engineers, the laboratory technicians to biologists developing new vaccines and operators of delicate equipment for nuclear physicists and chemists.

The numbers of these jobs have more than doubled in the last 15 years, are still growing fast. They require about two years of college, an interest in technology and machines and a desire to continue mental self-improvement through regular reading.

A Presidential economic report of several years ago esti­mated that our standard of living could rise 50 percent in 10 years if we continue to apply the results of new scientific knowledge at the rate we now are doing.

These improvements will be accomplished largely by well-educated workers who are interested in improving themselves. Reading is a main route to self-improvement, whether your purpose is to get a better job, to become a better citizen, or just to keep up with the world and the interesting people in it.

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