Broad range of skills key to crack tight job market

Leaders of business and educational institutions are grappling with challenging
fiscal issues. In boardrooms, where conversation once centered on expanding
product lines, broadening the customer base, and reinvesting the profits, current focus
instead is on cutbacks, layoffs, slashing budgets, increasing retirement incentives,
and restructuring divisions, all to maximize efficiency. These issues are new to
younger generations and are not expected to disappear soon.

By Norean Radke Sharpe and Gordon D. Prichett, Globe Staff

The current economic
climate suggests a need to
be armed with a broader
arsenal of skills to succeed
in a tight job market. Thus,
students of all ages should
be motivated to consider a
more diverse set of
educational objectives. Why
do job seekers assume all
they need to learn is how to
land a high-paying job? Why
can’t we return to the
perspective that college is a
place to develop
broad-based intellect? Add
critical thinking, comparative
analysis, and fundamental
quantitative skills, and you have a strong candidate for any entry-level job.

Students need to develop a broad set of abilities required for analysis of technical
issues: problem formulation, problem solving, and solution interpretation. With the
continual development and improvement of technologies and a computer-based office
and back office, quantitative fitness is a must. Quantitative literacy is frequently
confused with computational capacity. A report from last year’s forum on quantitative
literacy sponsored by the National Council on Education, The Mathematics Sciences
Education Board, and The Mathematical Association of America defines quantitative
literacy to be ”quantitative reasoning capabilities required of citizens in today’s
information age.” These capabilities are not the ability to multiply or do higher math,
but simply the ability to effectively synthesize and analyze information.

Quantitative literacy is more than a skill set; it is a crucial part of understanding and
comprehension, an approach to reading, writing, and analyzing daily information.
Students should be learning to think critically and constructively as they read the daily
newspaper, compare election candidates, respond to surveys, participate in a public
protest, balance their budgets, or even eventually join the dot-com world.

As critical as quantitative thinking is, its power is limited without the ability to convey
comparisons and recommendations to others. Thus communicating quantitative
information in a qualitative context is an equally essential ability.

The key to improving quantitative literacy is using an innovative and integrated
curriculum that teaches those talents as intertwined and inseparable. Schools and
colleges need to demand more writing of students and fewer loopholes that allow
students to avoid hard thinking and precise expression of thought.

Only by arming students with the ability to analyze, synthesize, and summarize can
we provide adequate preparation for the demands they will face in their careers.
Otherwise, fewer and fewer students will be armed for the jobs of the 21st century, and
the potential of the technological progress of the 20th century will not be realized.

Norean Radke Sharpe is associate professor of statistics and operations research,
and Gordon Prichett is professor of mathematics, at Babson College.

This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 5/19/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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