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I (a middle aged European) feel a bit silly now. I've had an American send his CV to me which listed "cursive writing" as a skill. A was bemused as for me it falls in the same bucket as "tie laces" or "ride a bike". IE something that has no value because everybody knows how to do it.

How wrong I turn out to be.

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I remember a science and technology TV program on Belgian TV back in the early nineties where they showed a PC program that could convert handwriting to text. Amazing!

But when they showed it in action, it couldn’t do cursive “because nobody writes cursive anyway”, according to the American developer.

At the time, I assumed that the guy just made that claim to excuse a serious limitation of his software: why would anyone not write cursive (which is faster)?

Devil's confused advocate here - depending on the age of the candidate, that might have been intended to be a "fun fact" sort of addition?

As in, it might have also read "Japanese calligraphy". Gives the HR person to ask about their passions a bit, figure out how they roll?

(Disregard that idea if this was actually just listed as a core job skill like "Word and Excel experience")

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