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Research in the Financial Services sector We have carried out observational work and learning opportunities development in three companies. Two of these are what are known as "life" companies, dealing in life insurance, pensions and related investment products. The third company is a specialist provider of current account mortgages. In the life companies, we have looked at TmL skills needs and developed learning opportunities in the areas of customer service for pensions (a "back office" department), and sales of pensions. We looked quite widely at "back office" functions (i.e. administrative departments dealing with current customers, via call centres and written communication), and found that those areas which were concerned only with handling specific processes (e.g. maturation of life policies) did not seem so demanding in terms of techno-mathematical skills. We found the more interesting areas to be those which are product-focussed – where the employees have to deal with the whole life-cycle of particular products in relation to the customer. In particular, we chose to focus on a Customer Enquiry Team that handles pensions enquiries, and how they respond to routine questions but sometimes need to pass on the enquiry to technical experts and thus having to make quite sophisticated judgements about the nature of the problem reported by the customer. The third company is a specialist provider of “current account mortgages”, via telephone and Internet. We found the interesting techno-mathematical aspect of this company’s work to be the difficulty of customers to understand the concept of the current account mortgage compared with standard mortgages, and thus the challenge the employees have in selling the product in the first place, and to hold on to customers who persist in not understanding the product that they have ‘bought’ and thus not managing their money and payments effectively. We developed learning opportunities that involved software tools (based on spreadsheets) that explored the mathematical models underlying the current account mortgage, with an emphasis on getting employees to be able to use these models to explain the mortgage to current and prospective customers. Learning opportunities for this sector Publications about this sector Kent, P., Noss, R., Guile, D., Hoyles, C., & Bakker, A (2007). “Characterising the use of mathematical knowledge in boundary crossing situations at work”. Mind, Culture, and Activity 14, 1-2, 64-82. Bakker, A., Kent, P., Hoyles, C., Noss, R. and Bhinder, C. (2006). “'It’s not just magic!' Learning opportunities with spreadsheets in the financial sector". In D. Hewitt (Ed.), Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics, 26, 1, 17-22. Available online: Bakker, A., Hoyles, C., Kent, P. & Noss, R. (2005). "Designing learning opportunities for Techno-mathematical Literacies in financial workplaces: A status report". Paper presented at the TLRP Conference, Warwick University, November 2005. Bakker, A., Hoyles, C., Kent, P. & Noss, R. (in preparation). "Learning through boundary crossing with computational artefacts". | |
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Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace project
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