Lifetime piling up: how many hours will you work?

How many hours do you expect to work in your lifetime? This may sound like a meaningless question, yet it is far from irrelevant. Reaching an answer to the question will shed a great deal of light on what is happening to the knowledge workforce in general and the shape of your personal future working life in particular.

In his book, The Age of Unreason, Charles Handy writes that for his generation, that is people who started their working lives in the 1950s, the average work life expectancy was around 100,000 hours.

Has the Australian IT job market hit bottom?

The optimistic interpretation of the latest Olivier Job Index information technology figures says while the number of job ads continues to fall – the rate at which job ad numbers are falling has slowed. In other words, things are continuing to get worse, but not dramatically so. In fact the official line from Robert Olivier in this press release says things are stabilizing.

The Olivier Job Index measures the number of advertised job. In June the number of tech jobs fell 1.9 percent from May. They were down almost 57 percent from the same time a year ago. Both numbers represent a faster decline for tech jobs than for the overall job market.

According to a report last week in The Australian (Tech employment pool drying up by Jennifer Foreshew) only 16 percent of senior managers in Australia’s corporate sector expect to hire staff in the next 12 months and about a third intend to reduce their headcount. Foreshew spoke to a number of companies who made similar comments about a lack of new work.

Official figures issued by Australia’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) on Friday say the number of IT professional job vacancies dropped 7.5 percent in June compared with May. Year-on-year the total number of jobs declined by 63 percent.

New Zealand IT sector now positive

A report in today’s Computerworld New Zealand (New Hudson survey shows IT more positive by David Watson) draws on quarterly figures from the recruitment firm Hudson. It says a net 16.4 percent of employers intend to increase permanent staffing levels in the June to September quarter. That’s up from the previous quarter’s 7.7 percent figure.

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Is Auckland a super city?

There’s a lot of talk and writing online about the New Zealand government’s super city plan for Auckland.

The correct style for super city is two lower case words. The term is not a name, at least not yet. It is a description. Capitals are only used for proper names, so there shouldn’t be any confusion or question over the term.

Nor is it one word. Over the past twenty years or so there’s been something of a fashion to run words together and separate the component words with a capital letter. If a company or organisation wishes to do that with its name, or the name of a product, it has every right to do so. But there’s no grammatical or logical reason to make a single word out of super city. Would you write Auckland is a BigCity? Of course not.

Fairfax’s Stuff.co.nz web site is confused about this. At the time of writing the newspaper company’s site has an Auckland Super City page which offers every permutation: one word, two words, upper case lower case. The New Zealand Herald is just as confused as this search shows: “supercity” Search Results. In fact it adds a hitherto unseen variation: Supercity, all one word with a single capital.

For clarifaction and background you may like to read my previous article about capital letters.

Better Writing: Apostrophe errors undermine credibility

You don’t always need to write obsessively correct English. I’ve written tips on how some grammar rules can be broken elsewhere in this series. One popular example is Better writing: And.

However, there are serious mistakes which are best avoided if you want to appear professional and intelligent. When you commit a grammar crime in, say, a business email, in a report or in a web post, you undermine your message. In many cases your clumsy and clueless English could be around for a long time warning the world not to take you seriously.

Apostrophes are often to blame for these credibility errors. If you are not a confident writer, alarm bells should ring every time you reach for the apostrophes key.

Five apostrophe errors to watch for:

1. The greengrocers’ apostrophe gets its name because so many handwritten shop signs use apostrophes incorrectly. It’s unfair to single out greengrocers — the mistake is widespread across the entire spectrum of trades and professions.

A greengrocers’ apostrophe happens when a writer turns a word into a plural by using an apostrophe s rather than the correct plural ending.

For example: Macintoshes and PCs not Macintosh’s and PC’s.

2. It’s when you mean its.
   Its is a possessive pronoun — like his or her. It’s is a contraction of “it is” or “it has”. If this bothers you, make a point of always writing it is out in full and never writing it’s. Alternatively try speaking the sentence and checking whether replacing its with “it is” makes sense.

And while we are on the subject, there is no such word as its’.

3. Confusing your with you’re. Your is another possessive pronoun. To check think of: his computer, her computer, its computer, your computer.

You’re is a contraction of “you are”, as in “you’re reading a column on basic grammatical errors”.

4. Muddling they’re, their and there. Another common apostrophe problem comes with “they’re” which is a shortened version of “they are”. Their is the possessive plural pronoun. As in; his computer, its computer, your computer, their computer. There is a place. It is the opposite of here. Their and there are particularly easy words to confuse when typing on a keyboard.
5. When to use who’s and whose. Another case of a possessive pronoun that doesn’t have an apostrophe being confused with a verb contraction. Think of: whose computer is that? Who’s using it?

Related articles:

• Better writing: Companies are singular
• Better writing: The inverted pyramid
• Better writing: Keep it simple
• Better writing: And
• Better writing: Go easy on the adjectives
• Better writing: Capital letters

Better writing: Rhythm

Short sentences are usually, but not always, best. Newspaper journalists are taught to only communicate one single thought in a sentence. That way the meaning is more likely to be clear to the reader.

The Economist Style Guide makes a joke of this in its guide to punctuation:

Use plenty. They keep sentences short. This helps the reader.

Much as I love short sentences, using too many of them makes text boring and difficult to read. They can also be uneconomical. As Harold Evans points out in Newsman’s English:

Often it is wasteful to introduce a subject and predicate for each idea. The subordinate clause in a complex sentence can state relations more precisely and more economically than can a strong of simple sentences or compound sentences joined by and, but, so, etc.

There’s another reason to use complex sentences in your writing. They add rhythm. Use too many short sentences and your copy will have a staccato rhythm that will annoy and distract readers. Use too many long sentences and your writing will lack pace, you may even lull your readers to sleep.

A similar logic can be applied to paragraphs. View them as bundles of closely related thoughts.

There’s no hard and fast rule about the best length for paragraphs. It’s a good idea to minimize the number of one sentence paragraphs you write. As with sentences, vary the pace. Too many consecutive short paragraphs is annoying. Too many long ones is hard work for the reader. Both approaches are difficult to read.

Above all else use paragraphs to make your writing easier to read.

This is part of a series of Better Writing columns.

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BusinessWeek columnist defines knowledge worker

Writing in this BusinessWeek opinion column Marshall Goldsmith says:

Knowledge workers can be defined as people who know more about what they are doing than their managers do.

I accept this is true and interesting, but it’s not much of a definition.

Update: Here’s a piece I wrote to explain the term – Who are the knowledge workers?