If school maths did not go well for you, that says almost nothing about whether you can do the maths a first job needs. They are not the same subject. This course is about the second one, and it is much smaller than you think.
Here is the whole list of what a till, a stockroom, a kitchen or a call centre actually asks you to do.
- Add and subtract amounts of money, quickly, often in your head
- Multiply by a small number: eight items at R12,50
- Take a percentage off, or add one on
- Read a table and find the row you need
- Notice when a number looks wrong
That is it. Five things.
Here is what nobody will ever ask you to do at work: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, factorising, anything with an x in it, or anything you had to memorise for an exam. Those were not useless, but they are not what is being tested when a supervisor hands you a float and a till.
The last one on the list, noticing when a number looks wrong, is the one employers value most and the one nobody teaches. It is also the easiest to get good at, because it does not need accuracy. It needs a rough answer, fast, so you can tell whether the exact one is sensible.
A customer buys 3 items at R19,99 each. The till says R199,97. What do you do?
What happens: The till is right about arithmetic and wrong about what was scanned. Three items at about R20 is about R60. R199,97 means something scanned ten times or the wrong item went through, and the customer will notice at the door if you do not notice now.
What happens: This is the whole skill. You did not calculate R59,97. You rounded to something easy, saw that the answer was miles out, and checked. That takes a second and it saves the shift.
I failed maths at school. Am I going to struggle here?
Probably not, and here is why. School maths is mostly about method, showing working and getting an exact answer under time pressure. Work maths is about money you can picture, numbers you meet every day, and being roughly right fast. Plenty of people who failed the first are very good at the second, especially anyone who has run a household budget or helped in a family business.
Can I not just use the calculator on my phone?
For anything complicated, yes, and nobody will mind. But you cannot hold a queue while you type, and in many shops your phone stays in your locker during a shift. The point of this course is not to ban the calculator. It is so that you can tell when the calculator, or the till, or a manager, has given you an answer that cannot be right.
Before you move on
- Round to easy numbers before you calculate exactly
- Practise spotting an answer that is obviously wrong
- Stop expecting this to feel like school
Check what you know
3 questions. Have a look at what this lesson asks.
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