Do You Speak Numbers?

Fluency in statistics is essential for making it in digital workforce.

“That stats class you hated? It’s going to come back to haunt you,” warned Jeanette Horan (MBA’93), IBM’s vice president and chief information officer, speaking on a Centennial Dean’s Speaker Series panel with Mike Wright, global CIO for McKinsey & Company.

Horan’s comment on statistics may be the worst nightmare of many college students—and seasoned pros—but if you want to stay ahead in the digital workforce, her advice is simple: be fluent in the language of numbers.

“For anybody embarking on a career now, this world of data and analytics is absolutely at the front,” Horan noted. “You need to be able to speak in that language. Get out of the rows-and-columns mindset and think about how to make sense of what’s trending.”

In the past, an organization dictated the conversation with its customer. Now, according to Horan, in a world where news goes viral in an instant, it’s the reverse. “They dictate the conversation with you and about you—and that is one of the biggest things to think about.”