How poor grammar negatively impacts your career

Melbourne: Poor spelling and grammar can adversely affect your career, your business and how you're perceived as a professional, experts have said.

The lack of basic literacy skills among some younger employees and recent graduates has become such a problem for businesses that some are introducing language and grammar lessons, News.com.au reported.

"Poor spelling and grammar use by employees has become a serious issue for employers," Anna Underhill, a consultant at an HR firm said.

Experts believe grammar gaffes and poor spelling reflect badly not just on employers but also on employees.

"Email correspondence is particularly a problem for many employers because it sets the tone for the culture of the company," Underhill said.

While employees are often given extensive inductions into company processes, basic grammar and spelling are ignored. The most common errors by workers while writing emails are mixing up 'it's' and 'its', 'effects' and 'affects' and 'which' and 'that'.

Putting apostrophes in the plurals of acronyms, for example 'KPI's' instead of 'KPIs' was also a common error.

Some erred when switching between singular and plural when referring to company names, for example 'Westpac are' instead of 'Westpac is'.

'No Indians or Asians' job ad triggers outrage in Australia

Melbourne: A contractor of Australia's supermarket chain Coles has come under fire for publishing a job advertisement, which barred Indians or Asians from applying.

"Store requires no Indians or Asians please. Must speak English (sic)", read the online ad posted on Sunday.

The ad on the Gumtree website sought cleaners for a supermarket at Eastlands Shopping Centre in Hobart, according to local media reports.

It triggered outraged on social media sites, with people calling for a boycott of the store.

Local newspaper The Mercury reported that the ad was later removed from the site.

A Coles spokesman yesterday admitted the ad had been posted by a contract company responsible for cleaning its Rosny store.

"The ad was placed without Coles' knowledge and we were extremely concerned to learn of the ad and its contents," spokesman Jim Cooper said.

Tasmania's Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Robin Banks was qouted as saying that she wanted to track down the cleaning contractor to pursue possible legal action.

"It's unlawful to blanket preclude a person because of their race," she said.

Banks said she often received complaints about job ads that discriminated against particular races.

She said both the company offering the position and the publisher of the advert could be subject to legal action.

"Gumtree is probably in breach (of the law) as well because the Act says you can't publish, display, etcetera, material that is discriminatory," Banks said, adding "I've had other ads in print form and other sites brought to my attention, which I've followed up with the publisher. That tends to result in it getting pulled very quickly."

From: NDTV