Life skills come in all sorts of shapes and forms, personal, emotional, physical, technical, etc. My #1 technical life skill is definitely the ability to touch type, and it has helped me enormously from University (where I studied Computer Science) onwards. My mother told me that she had booked me in for a four-week typing course the summer I turned 17, and sure enough I went along 0900-1630 five days a week for four weeks and learned to type. Fortunately I was not the only bloke there - the other guy was from a rich oil family in Kuwait! I was a bit green in those days and the girlies on the course were all a bit embarassing and enough years older than me that I assumed they had boyfriends or at least enough experience in the chatting-up stakes for me to bother showing any interest. A chance missed in learning how to chat-up, but not relevant in the long term as I certainly found the right one in the end and we recently celebrated 15 years of marriage.So, typing. A skill which will help you progress a lot faster in anything to do with a keyboard. It saved me paying someone to type my A-level Geography project at school, my thesis at University (got top marks of the year for it too, they told me!) and so on. Now working in IT, it puts me ahead of a number of people who still have to stare at the keyboard using two fingers and a thumb. In a four week course, I achieved the Pitmans Elementary award (the nearest equivalent today is this) and got to 38 wpm. Currently I type at 45-50wpm, which means that I can type files notes of a conversation with a customer as we are talking. Very useful.
