By Steven Blakenship
I had been out of work for four months when my sister sat me down and told me something I did not want to hear.
She had been watching me apply for jobs, get called back for interviews, and then not get hired. Over and over. She had looked at my resume and it was solid. My experience was real. My references were strong. So she asked me something nobody else had thought to ask.
She said — have they been giving you typing tests? I said yes. She said how do you think you are doing on them. I said I thought I was doing fine.
She pulled up my typing speed on a free online test. I was typing 29 words per minute with 84 percent accuracy.
The minimum for every office position I had been applying for was 40 words per minute with 90 percent accuracy. I had been disqualifying myself before the interview even ended and I had no idea.
My name is Darnell. I am 41 years old and I had spent fifteen years in restaurant management before my employer closed all locations and let the entire staff go. I was good at my job. I knew how to run a kitchen, manage inventory, lead a team, handle difficult customers, and keep a business running under pressure. But I had never needed to type quickly. Everything in restaurant management is verbal, physical, and immediate. Nobody cares how fast you type when the dinner rush hits.
Transitioning to office work was harder than I expected and the typing gap was the wall I kept running into without knowing it.
After my sister showed me my score I went home that night and found TypeMaster 202. I took the practice test first so I knew exactly what I was working with. 29 words per minute. 84 percent accuracy. That was my starting point and I wrote it down so I would never forget where I began.
I practiced every single day. Morning and evening. Sometimes during lunch. I worked through the structured lessons in order — home row first, then building outward key by key, then moving to full word practice and sentence drills. I used the timed practice tests every three days to track my progress and see where I was improving and where I still needed work.
The hardest part was not the practicing. The hardest part was the mental game. At 41 years old learning something new feels different than it did at 21. Your hands have habits. Your brain has patterns. Retraining both at the same time while also dealing with the stress and financial pressure of unemployment required a kind of discipline I did not know I still had in me.
But I kept going. Every day. Even when progress felt slow. Even when I had a bad practice session where my accuracy dropped instead of improving. Even on the days when I wanted to quit and go back to applying for restaurant jobs just because it felt more familiar and less humbling.
Six weeks in I hit 45 words per minute with 93 percent accuracy. I cried. Actually sat at my kitchen table and cried because I knew what that number meant. It meant the wall was gone.
I updated my resume to include my typing speed and applied for three office positions that week. All three called me back. I passed the typing assessment on every single one.
I accepted a position as an administrative coordinator at a healthcare company sixty two days after my sister showed me my original score. The salary is better than my restaurant management salary. The benefits include health insurance for my kids for the first time in four months. And I type every single day at my desk with a speed and accuracy I earned one practice session at a time.
If you are unemployed and wondering why you keep getting passed over — get your typing tested today. Go to typemaster202.com and take the free practice test right now. If your score is below 40 words per minute you have found your answer. And you have found your solution in the same place.
Sixty days. That is all it took to change everything.