Numeracy Skills

One of the many Employability Skills, which includes understanding numbers, quantities such as areas, volumes, lengths, application rates, plus shapes, such as rectangles, triangles and cubes, and how to actually manipulate and use figures for accurate calculations.

Most people deal with figures on an everyday basis, buying lunch or goods from the Internet, retail shopping or the weekly food shop. A solid foundation in handling money transactions will not only help you manage your own budget but makes you much more comfortable with handling figures in general, especially in a work situation.

Having a good grasp of figures can demonstrate that you should be able to handle spreadsheet figures (even if this means training in the software), ordering of stationery and other items, filling in expense forms or time sheets, analysing research data, calculating material application rates or materials ordering for projects.

TheBBC's Skillswise site also provides comprehensive resources for numbers, calculation, percent and fractions, measuring, shapes and graphs.

The web site for theSkills Workshop provides lots of examples that you can practice developing your numeracy skills.