Gen Z-ers, those born between 1997 and 2012 and who have grown up with smartphones, are probably the most tech-savvy generation. But when it comes to working with computers, there is an important skill they tend to lack - being  able to type without looking at the keys.

One reason for this shortcoming is a change in the K12 curriculum. The Wall Street Journal reports that over the past 25 years, the number of U.S. high schools teaching typing has fallen drastically and that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, while about 44% of students who graduated high school in 2000 took a keyboarding course, by 2019 that figure had plummeted to 2.5%.

Another reason is that efficient use of a smartphone requires looking at the keys rather than at the on-screen output - the exact opposite of efficient use of a computer keyboard. For texting the best method is to use both thumbs, for typing long passages of text the ideal is to use all your digits. Becoming adept at touch-typing means training your fingers to find the relevant letters by touch and as you you no longer need to look at the keyboard you can look at the screen and concentrate not only on what you are typing but also on how you want to present it.

One interesting finding from a 2019 study by researchers at Aalto University in Finland was that the Gen-Z participants who could text fastest, texted far less than Millennials - a finding attributed to their preference for platforms like Snapchat and TikTok that are primarily visually driven.

The online text-typing test devised for the purposes of this study was taken by 37,370 people.The team compared the results with those of the desktop typing test that had 168,000 participants that we reported on in What Makes a Fast Typist in 2018. The conclusion was that on average, two-thumb texters were able to tap out 38 words per minute, 25% slower than the 51 words per minute people typed on keyboards. However, the error rate was remarkably low, at  2.3%, which researchers credited to algorithmic methods like predictive text and autocomplete that use context to improve spelling, sentence structure, and grammar. 

With regard to proficiency at texting there was a clear age difference. While older Millennials, aged 30-39, were only able to type 32 words per minute, younger Millennials, aged 20-29, managed 37 words per minute and Gen-Zers, aged 10 to 19, were the fastest, achieving about 40 words per minute, a feat that the researchers speculated is because this group encountered smartphone keyboards as their first input device.

As I point out in Weak Typing - The Lost Art of the Keyboard, as programmers, the keyboard is still our main interface to the computer and for this reason, even in this age of voice input and AI assistance, touch typing is still a useful skill.  How much more productive would you be if you could simply input your code into the computer at the speed of thought. There are apps that help you to develop touch typing at 60 words per minute or more and impart the skill to your fingers of knowing where the keys are, so freeing you to concentrate not on how you are typing but what you are thinking.

More Information

Gen Z-ers Are Computer Whizzes - Just Don’t Ask Them to Type

Related Articles

What Makes a Fast Typist

Weak Typing - The Lost Art of the Keyboard

You Don't Need To Touch Type To Go Fast 

Finland Dumps Handwriting In Favor Of Typing

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