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  3. How to Be an Employee Most of you graduating today will be employees all your working life, working for somebody else and fo

How to Be an Employee Most of you graduating today will be employees all your working life, working for somebody else and fo

admin2009-04-23  35
问题                                      How to Be an Employee
    Most of you graduating today will be employees all your working life, working for somebody else and for a paycheck. And so will most, if net all, of the thousands of other young Americans graduating this year in all the other schools and colleges across the country.
    Ours has become a society of employees. A hundred years or so ago only one out of every five Americans at work was employed, i.e., worked for somebody else. Today only one out of five is not employed but working for himself. And whereas fifty years ago "being employed" meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand, the employee of today is increasingly a middle-class person with a substantial formal education, holding a professional or management job requiring intellectual and technical skills. Indeed, two things have characterized American society during these last fifty years: the middle and upper classes have become employees, and middle-class and upper-class employees have been the fastest growing groups in our working population—growing so fast that the industrial worker, that oldest child of the Industrial Revolution, has been losing in numerical importance despite the expansion of industrial production.
    This is one of the most profound social changes any country has ever undergone. It is, however, a perhaps even greater change for the individual young man about to start. Whatever he does, in all likelihood he will do it as an employee; wherever he aims, he will have to try to reach it through being an employee.
    Yet you will find little if there is anything written on what it is to be an employee. You can find a great deal of very dubious advice on how to get a job or how to get a promotion. You can also find a good deal of advice on work in a chosen field, whether it be metallurgy(冶金学) or salesmanship, the machinist’s trade or bookkeeping. Every one of these trades requires different skills, sets different standards, and requires a different preparation. Yet they all have employeeship in common. And increasingly, especially in the large business or in government, employeeship is more important to success than the special professional knowledge or skill. Certainly more people fail because they do not know the requirements of being an employee than because they do not adequately possess the skills of their trade; the higher you climb the ladder, the more you get into administrative or executive work, the greater the emphasis on ability to work within the organization rather than on technical competence or professional knowledge.
    Being an employee is thus the one common characteristic of most careers today. The special profession or skill is visible and clearly defined, and a well-laid-out sequence of courses, degrees, and jobs leads into it. But being an employee is the foundation. And it is much more difficult to prepare for it. Yet there is no recorded information on the art of being an employee.
    The first question we might ask is: what can you learn in college that will help you in being an employee? The schools teach a great many things of value to the future accountant, the future doctor, or the future electrician. Do they also teach anything of value to the future employee? The answer is: "Yes—they teach the one thing that is perhaps most valuable for the future employee to know. But very few students bother to learn it."
    This one basic skill is the ability to organize and express ideas in writing and in speaking.
    As an employee you work with and through other people. This means that your success as an employee will depend on your ability to communicate with people and to present your own thoughts and ideas to them so they will both understand what you are driving at and be persuaded. The letter, the report or memorandum, the ten-minute spoken "presentation" to a committee are basic tools of the employee.
    If you work as a soda jerker you will, of course, not need much skill in expressing yourself to be effective. If you work on a machine your ability to express yourself will be of little importance. But as soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to communicate with others through the spoken or me written word. And the further away your job is from manual work, the larger the organization of which you are an employee, the more important it will be that you know how to convey your thoughts in writing or speaking. In the very large organization, whether it is the government, the large business corporation, or the Army, this ability to express oneself is perhaps the most important of all the skills a man can possess.
    Of course, skill in expression is not enough by itself. You must have something to say in the first place. The popular picture of the engineer, for instance, is that of a man who works with a slide rule, T square(丁字尺), and compass. And engineering students reflect this picture in their attitude toward the written word as s6mething quite irrelevant to their jobs. But the effectiveness of the engineer depends as much on his ability to make other people understand his work as it does on the quality of the work itself.
    Expressing one’s thoughts is one skill that the school can really teach, especially to people born without natural writing or speaking talent. Many other skills can be learned later—in this country there are literally thousands of places that offer training to adult people at work. But the foundations for skill in experience in organizing ideas and data, in brushing aside the irrelevant, in wedding outward form and inner content into one structure; and above all, the habit of verbal expression.
    If you do not lay these foundations during your school years, you may never have an opportunity again.
    If you were to ask me that strictly vocational courses there are in the typical college curriculum, my answer—now that the good old habit of the "theme a day" has virtually disappeared—would be: the writing of poetry and the writing of short stories. Not that I expect many of you to become poets or short-story writers—far from it. But these two courses offer the easiest way to obtain some skill in expression. They force one to be economical with language. They force one to organize thought. They demand of one that he give meaning to every word. They train the ear for language, its meaning, its precision, its overtones—and its pitfalls(陷阱). Above all they force one to write.
    I know very well that the typical employer does not understand this as yet, and that he may look with suspicion on a young college graduate who has majored, let us say, in short-story writing. But the same employer will complain—and with good reason—that the young men whom he hires when they get out of college do not know how to write a simple report, do not know how to tell a simple story, and are in fact virtually illiterate. And he will conclude—rightly—that the young men are not really effective, and certainly not employees who are likely to be successful.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案A
解析 由第二段可知大约一百多年前每五个美国人中只有一个人是被雇佣的，而现在每五个人中就有四个人是被雇佣的，为自己而工作的比例大大下降了，所以说过去大部分的美国人是为自己而工作的，此判断正确。
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