2017 · Study · 2014–2017
School mathematics and the reasoning a workplace asks for
The gap was not a shortage of arithmetic. It was a shortage of judgement about messy, incomplete, slightly political numbers.
We compared the quantitative tasks in school syllabuses with the tasks junior staff were actually given: a roster, a no-show rate, two periods collected in different ways, a dashboard nobody had documented. The school tasks had a right answer. The workplace tasks had a defensible one, plus a sentence about what was still unknown.
Data Practitioner was built for that second kind of task. Clean enough to answer. Show the working. Name the limit. A chart for a decision, not a chart for decoration.
Employers who read the certificate told us they were not looking for a prodigy. They were looking for a person who would pause before a figure went into a board pack. That pause is a professional skill, and we were happy to examine it directly.
The paper argued, and we still argue, that quantitative reasoning for non-specialists is a civic subject. It belongs beside computing, not above it as a privilege.