TRIPLE E TRAINING HOLDINGS

Project management skills challenge students’ command of language and math. Developing their ability to forecast and manage resources, time, and money, students frequently must translate words to numbers and numbers to words. All the separate project management skills are inter-related, and all of them build on students’ ability to see patterns and trends, solve for x, and develop timelines, work lists, and detailed instructions. Project management skills support a manager’s complex juggling act, helping him control costs, motivate people, satisfy clients, meet demanding schedules and stay sane. In South Africa’s system of adult education, experiential learning drives students’ success at every stage of the curriculum, but it takes on extra urgency as students practice project management skills. Theory and practice don’t always align, so students must use their entire repertoire of problem-solving skills, working with numbers and learning the subtle language of negotiation.

Absolutely as essential as the command of languages, numeracy supports advancement in the workplace while promoting advancement in society. In its simplest form, numeracy requires command of numbers, their values, the relationships among them, and how to manipulate them.

Naturally, numeracy begins with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but it advances to relationships among numbers. Squares, square roots, and cubes determine area and volume measures in construction and packaging so that understanding those relationships is essential to understanding building or shipping.

Effective management depends upon controlling costs, so that understanding the relationship between the cost of labour and a company’s sales becomes essential to turning a profit. Numeracy empowers workers to express these relationships as numbers, taking away the mystery and showing the result.

Mathematical principles and logic represent two versions of the same intellectual processes, and numeracy makes all kinds of problem solving much easier. Numeracy drives business.