Why do most of us earn considerably less than the "average" salary? Do
statisticians really know whether our GDP is growing or shrinking -
and, by extension, whether or not we are in a recession? Perhaps they
stand outside every factory and office and "count" the output.
Why do newspaper reports of survey findings consistently sound more dramatic than experience suggests they should - not least in the HR field, where we consistently read that nine out of ten employers are cancelling Christmas or 80% of us are planning to quit our jobs?
If you haven't stumbled upon it yet, the BBC is running an excellent series of articles on the uses and abuses of statistics, with a series of "lessons" on averages, percentages and similarly slippery concepts.
The writing is incredibly simple to follow - including, for example, an excellent explanation of why it is that most of us have slightly more than the average number of feet.
It's probably a fact that eight out of ten HR practitioners have problems understanding statistics - a number as true now as it was when I first made it up.
So, if you need to use surveys and statistics in your job, even peripherally to inform decisions, and feel you should have paid rather more attention in GCE (or GCSE, according to age) maths classes, you could do worse than to start here.
If you haven't stumbled upon it yet, the BBC is running an excellent series of articles on the uses and abuses of statistics, with a series of "lessons" on averages, percentages and similarly slippery concepts.
The writing is incredibly simple to follow - including, for example, an excellent explanation of why it is that most of us have slightly more than the average number of feet.
It's probably a fact that eight out of ten HR practitioners have problems understanding statistics - a number as true now as it was when I first made it up.
So, if you need to use surveys and statistics in your job, even peripherally to inform decisions, and feel you should have paid rather more attention in GCE (or GCSE, according to age) maths classes, you could do worse than to start here.
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