For 5 December, our advent offering relates to the slightly alarming statistic that only five per cent of British businesses are providing any kind of numeracy training and support for staff.
The finding, highlighted by GSM London, gets you wondering how we can ever expect to fill the much-publicised skills gap if companies throughout the UK are not taking the necessary steps to ensure employees have a basic foundation from which to work from. As something that is done throughout a person’s school years, it’s thus no surprise that 81 per cent of adults have not tried to improve numeracy skills since leaving full-time education. The UK currently has about eight million working-age adults who are classified as “below-functional” when it comes to numeracy, and about five million categorised the same for literacy. To put that into context, that means 20 per cent of working-age adults have numeracy skills which are equivalent to that of where a nine year-old should be. Read more about the skills gap:- Are we facing an IT skills shortage?
- Two birds, one stone: Facing up to the gender imbalance and skills shortage in STEM
- Is overseas talent the answer to the UK’s skills shortage?
Previous: 4 December on the definitive business advent calendar
Next: 6 December on the definitive business advent calendar
Share this story