Male wearing brown suit: Numeracy and literacy skills are important in the IT industry.
With numeracy, it's important because you're dealing with facts and figures, and you need to be able to understand what those figures represent.
Male wearing grey jumper: It's important to have enough free space on the disc.
Without free space, you would no longer be able to store information on those discs.
This is the drive itself, it shows a little graph here of the drive, and we can see that the drive itself is 149 gig, and that the used space is 56.1 gig.
Male wearing brown suit: IT equipment uses a large amount of electrical power, so we need to be able to accurately monitor that.
Male wearing white shirt: Our ratio of computers to support engineers is about 150.
Each engineer can look after 150 computers, and if we bring on a customer with 300 users, that tells us that we need to hire two more people.
Male wearing brown suit: When a problem happens at a data centre, we need to be able to track the amount of time the engineer spends on that incident so that we can properly build the customer.
Male wearing blue shirt: When somebody phones up, I would take a note of what time they phoned up and when they finish, and make a note of what time that I finished working on the job.
Male wearing brown suit: When our engineers are talking to each other, they can use jargon, obviously, because it speeds the process up, but when they then go out and speak to customers, they need to then make sure that they're explained to the customer exactly what that means because the customer may not always know.
Male wearing blue shirt: I wouldn't ask a customer to look for their [Indistinct], but I would guide them to looking for the sockets on the back of their computer which has status lights, and that would help them.
Male wearing brown suit: It's extremely important for anyone wanting to get into the IT industry to bring their numeracy and literacy skills up to scratch because you will be needing them every day.
Quick tips for tutors
These resources cover some of the literacy and numeracy skills that may be needed to work in IT and office. They also signpost to further websites to find more information about this vocational area. All the resources can be cross-referenced to the national adult literacy or numeracy curriculum and will also be relevant for learners on functional skills courses.
Downloadable Factsheets
Level 1 - Writing formal and informal emails
How to compose formal and informal emails, with guidance on the key points to consider when writing.
Level 1 - Useful words for IT and office work
Summary of common words found in IT and office, including tips on how to remember spellings.
Downloadable Worksheets
Entry 1 & 2 - Office employee of the month
Office employee of the month snakes and ladders game.
Entry 3 - Skills for IT and office work
Assess your skills for work-related tasks in IT and office by completing this chart.
Entry 3 - Using the spell-checker for IT and office documents
Exercise in practising spell-checker skills.
Level 1 - IT and office words in use
Exercise in matching words to their definitions and writing sentences using words in their correct context.
Level 1 - Choosing the appropriate wording for emails
Exercise in selecting the correct wording to use in formal and informal emails.
