Careers decided by text message

Teens' SMS style 'the key to their future'

Nick Farrell, vnunet.com 29 Jul 2002

Children's text messages could hold the key to their future careers, according to a new study.

Researchers conducting the study of 1,000 mobile phone users for Woolworths, examined how different professions wrote text messages and divided them into four groups: creatives, jugglers, controllers and facilitators.

Creatives (actors, designers, advertising executives and landscape gardeners, for example) used text abbreviations and slang, varied between using upper and lower case letters, and had phones with customised ring tones and screen settings.

Jugglers (teachers, office workers and emergency service workers) used capitals, lower case letters and punctuation correctly, never lost their phones and tended to grip their phone between their chin and shoulder while talking.

Controllers (armed forces, lawyers and sales reps) used capitals and never abbreviated but only sent short messages, while facilitators (nurses, nannies, personal assistants) always used lower case and added characters like smiley faces.

Researchers were able to put children into these four groups too, possibly giving some indication of their future career path. For example, a controller was more likely to end up in senior management or the armed forces.

Psychologist Sidney Crown said that text message style was as individual and revealing as handwriting.

"As fewer and fewer teens are using the written word nowadays, there is some validity in looking to other ways of determining the type of person they are, particularly with regards to what kind of job they are likely to be best suited to," he said.

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