The kids aren’t reading any more. Should employers care?

Over the past few months, there have been numerous surveys and reports which suggest that children and young adults aren’t reading as much as they used to. These were crystallised by a piece in The Atlantic earlier this month entitled The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.
It spoke of a shift, even at the world’s best universities, away from full classic texts, towards excerpts and shorter texts. These are better suited to the modern attention span (and capacity to read), both of which are being eroded, largely by apps such as TikTok and Instagram.
I wanted to sense check this. So I turned to my in-house focus group, the 14-year-old. “Do you read a lot?” I asked. “Not really,” she replied, looking up from her iPhone.
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As a formerly bookish child, I felt a reflexive pang that she wasn’t losing herself in the worlds of great literature. But I’m a business writer so, next, I found myself wondering — will it affect her career? Will future employers care if she can’t quote Jane Austen or allude to The Great Gatsby?
The 14-year-old makes an interesting case study here. Her school reports are so uniformly good that parents’ evenings are dull affairs lacking in any excitement and jeopardy. Moreover, she is an accomplished athlete who plays sport at a level I can only dream of (in fact, I often marvel that we’re related). I never worry about her future employability. It would be ridiculous for me to insist she spends her spare time reading George Eliot rather than scrolling through the cats of TikTok. But, still.
Sir Cary Cooper, 50th anniversary professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester Business School, says that the effect of less reading among teens and young adults may be mixed when it comes to the workplace. “Books do make us reflect and think — they develop concentration and patience.” However, he adds: “The younger generation are much better with IT tools. If I ask my granddaughter to make a five-minute film, I’m shocked by the quality of what she can produce with a phone.”
It’s not just the under 25s. Some of the most successful people I know manage two beach thrillers a year. Silicon Valley tech titans prefer bro-ish takes on Stoicism to literary musings. As a member of Gen X, I also know we’ve been here before. I was ten in 1981 and so perfectly placed to have my brain turned to pixellated mush by the first wave of video games. When I should have been getting stuck into Updike and Bellow, I was busy becoming a champion at Ms Pac-Man (curiously, not Pac-Man). And I definitely can’t make a professional video using my phone.
All this leaves one wondering if perhaps highbrow reading is just another nice-to-have when it comes to the workplace. No more valuable than pastimes like photography, cookery or skiing. But, in fact, this is wrong — there is a strong business case for bookishness.
Frank Hakemulder, an associate professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University (and an affiliated professor at the University of Stavanger), who studies the psychology of reading, says that although he likes “art for art’s sake” there are several areas where challenging texts deliver workplace benefits. First, reading them makes us better at understanding a complicated and rapidly changing world. “Often you need a large vocabulary to access, make sense of and communicate complex information,” he says.
It also improves your cognitive patience — reading tough books helps us stick at tasks that require sustained concentration. Finally, reading builds empathy: a book really does force us to walk a mile in another person’s shoes. Although Hakemulder describes the last of these as a “softer” benefit, companies today are always talking about the importance of empathy, so I’m prepared to give it the same weight as the other two.
There’s also the creative side of things. There’s plenty of research that shows reading sparks more imaginative thinking than screens. Cooper says that he’s concerned that a lack of reading could result in lower quality writing which is then augmented by technologies such as ChatGPT. “If people come up with an idea and then ask AI (which is trained on existing information) to write it, where’s the originality, creativity and innovation going to come from?”
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A colleague, a millennial, fears that Gen Z are guinea pigs. She says that she really notices a difference between her own cohort who grew up with dial-up and without smartphones and those in their 20s who barely know what limited data is. So, all in all, I think I can convince myself that there is a pretty decent work and careers argument for reading.
For what it’s worth, I reckon fiction could try harder here too. Literature tends not to concern itself overly with the humdrum, grubby business of earning a living. I can only think of a handful of books set in workplaces that aren’t glamorous publishing companies. Something Happened and Then We Came to the End spring to mind. TV, by contrast, shines — shows like Industry and The Office make fictional workplaces come alive.
But if literature should engage more, then so too should companies. I occasionally come across businesses which encourage their employees to read. But this is not widespread and I remember it being considerably more widespread 20 years ago. Nor is there much interest from the top. A friend who works in tech PR says: “I rarely meet a CEO who reads fiction.”
This, in particular, chimes with my own experience. I’ve lost track of the number of Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins books I’ve seen on executive desks over the years — and I struggle to believe these are any better than TikTok.