Touch Typing

Forgive me for this stupid question but how important is it to be able to touch type ?

I currently work in a hands on IT environment, mostly repairing hardware faults and the windows GUI environment and have never learned to touch type.

However i am considering furthering my career to MCSA level and beyond (hopefully)

Is it important to learn touch typing for this ?

I don't want to look like a dinosaur or a barbarian.

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Comments

NinjaBoy

People in IT aren't secretaries, data inputer's, etc The need to touch type isn't a high need skills for someone who fixes PC, server's, networks, etc.

I can't touch type, but I can type fast - but this comes with years of working with them.

-Ken

sprkymrk

I would say it's a good thing to be able to type quickly, but not critical. There's a guy in our office the boss calls "Mr. Huntenpeck".

stup4

Thanks guys

Vogon Poet

Depends what you eventually want to do.
Typing quickly sometimes helps, but probably not super-critical.
If you ever want to go to the dark side (management), it will be a good skill to have due to the excessive reports and policies that you will have to create. Not everybody has secretaries.
Personally, I think it's a good basic skill to have anyway.

Tesl

I think most computer people should be able to touch type, it's one of those things that comes naturally in my experience.

Then again, I've been typing on computers for as long as I can remember, and doing a speed test have managed to clock in at over 100wpm with 98% accuracy. Then again, I was really going for it that time! (And had the phrase to type in completely memorized!)

Just keep chatting to people online and it will soon come

Mishra

I can touch type but I find myself look at the keyboard for when I need to put in passwords and things like that. Or if I am putting in a linux command like shutdown -r now

I don't want to be typing shutdown -h now and halt a server if I couldn't get to it. ^_^

So looking at the keyboard is necessary in IT anyways.

Tesl

Mishra wrote:

I can touch type but I find myself look at the keyboard for when I need to put in passwords and things like that. Or if I am putting in a linux command like shutdown -r now

I don't want to be typing shutdown -h now and halt a server if I couldn't get to it. ^_^

So looking at the keyboard is necessary in IT anyways.

For passwords, possibly. But for typing in commands, I'd say its much safer to be watching the screen than the keys, as far as catching errors go anyway.

For example, how many people have you seen who make spelling mistakes when typing, but don't notice them for a while because they are too busy staring at the keys? Or when a window they are typing in loses focus and they waste loads of time because they don't notice right away?

If you can touch type, you should be watching the screen for all and any errors as they come up. So you would probably be more likely to notice the "h" than the "r" when touch typing

Trailerisf

I am the fastest two finger typist that you have ever seen. Yes, I can even type in the dark. I dont look at the keyboard when I type.

For some reason, twenty-five years of typing like a moron has stuck.

JDMurray

I've never been able to touch-type and I'll probably never learn because I would take such a prolonged hit in my keyboard-oriented productivity that it would not be practical. If there was a keyboarding bootcamp for touch-typing where, in only a few days, I could learn proper QWERTY or Dvorak keyboarding while unlearning 35+ years of bad typing habits I would go for it.

liven

by no means is it essential.

I work with a GIFTED security admin that can barely touch type.

I can touch type and I like the fact that I can do, so I would recommend learning. Just chip away at it and one day you will be flying.

keatron

I took a typing class (by force) in I believe the 8th or 9th grade in school. I guess I've never really thought about it since then. It certainly comes in handy as I can see what I'm producing as I type it. But the number one reason for being able to type is.............drum roll...........................

Being able to reply to posts fast of Techexams!!!!!!!

Slowhand

keatron wrote:

I took a typing class (by force) in I believe the 8th or 9th grade in school. I guess I've never really thought about it since then.

Yup, I'm in the same boat. Took a typing class in high school, that's pretty much all it really did for me. I learned to type relatively fast, and then it's just been a skill that I've continued using when I've been in chatrooms, on forums, writing emails, and using the command-line. (I don't include coding. I'm hardly a good enough programmer to be typing 90wpm while cranking out code, and that has nothing to do with the speed I type.) I don't think it's an "essential skill" you have to have, but it's probably something that you could look into learning and practicing at some point when you're not overly busy with certifications, learning more essential things, or work/school, and things along those lines. Will it hinder your career to be "hunting n' pecking"? Probably not. Will it help you to be able to type like the wind? Maybe, but usually only when you're doing more mundane tasks like writing emails, rather than when you're performing administrative tasks.

JDMurray

keatron wrote:

I took a typing class (by force) in I believe the 8th or 9th grade in school.

Ah, being in band from 6th through 12th grade got me out of a lot of those classes. So that's where I first missed my chance to be among the fastest posters on TE.

seuss_ssues

If you want to learn to type better two words:

cisco/Linux console

you work enough with a system that is console only and you learn to not only touch type the alphabet but the majority of the symbols and numbers

programming never hurt either; you use lots of brackets, braces, etc

sprkymrk

seuss_ssues wrote:

If you want to learn to type better two words:

cisco/Linux console

you work enough with a system that is console only and you learn to not only touch type the alphabet but the majority of the symbols and numbers

programming never hurt either; you use lots of brackets, braces, etc

Email is where most of us type all day. Most programmers I know make heavy use of copy/paste functions rather than retyping the code every time.

I had a 6 week typing class as a 15 year old in high school. Got up to about 40 wpm with no errors (if you made an error, you got no credit for anything typed after that - this was in the days of electric typewriters, no keyboards with backspace keys). However, I never touched a keyboard again until I was almost 30 years old.

iDShaDoW

I grew up in Waltham, MA near Boston.

They had all the kids taking typing lessons by 5th grade.

I forget the name of the program at the time. It was like Paws or something with a cat on Apple PCs that booted off of the 5-inch floppies.

Then I started using computers heavily for gaming since around 6th grade when my cousin built my family a PC with a Diamond Multimedia Viper videocard and became more proficient with touch-typing.

They had me messing around with DOS and editing the config and bat files and modifying the memory allocations so I could improve gaming performance haha.

drthtater

geez, I think i squeak by with 30 wpm

Tesl

http://www.calculatorcat.com/typing_test/

I'm interested in seeing how people do with this. I've just managed to clock in at 132wpm on one of them

Even I had no idea how fast I could type. I think I've actually got quite a bit faster since those old tests that I used to do. I've never actually done any typing lessons or training, and apparently the way I type is pretty unorthodox. Fingers in the wrong place for example (My natural position has my left hand on the WAD keys and my right hand fingers on , ; and shift heh)