Kev Kennedy's Blog

The could you should watch out for

There’s an advert now for teaching which promises you that you ‘could’ earn up to £35,000 a year if you trained to teach.

Having known a large number of people who have gone into teaching as a career, I’d call that a very optimistic claim. So much so, it’s almost a lie. You ‘could’ earn £35,000 a year. You’re more likely to find that at the end of the first year, when your salary is supposed to rise slightly, that your school will need to trim its budget and will give you the boot so they can hire someone newly qualified and therefore cheaper.

It’s happened to plenty of people I know.

Similarly a driving school says you ‘could’ earn up to £30,000 a year. You ‘could’ earn that doing any job on minimum wage if you were prepared to work for 6,500 hours a year (that’s 2,000 hours off in any given year).

My point is it’s a meaningless, yet beguiling, claim. ‘You could earn x’ is the line trotted out by almost every company looking to recruit. But ‘could’ is not the same as ‘will’; possibility is not the same as probability (which is not the same as fact).

Next time you see any sentence promising you something that ‘could’ happen, mentally add ‘or not’ on the end.

“You could earn up to £35,000 a year… or not.”

 

Created on Tue 16th June 2009 09:24