Williams is struggling to find strong candidates in math
If you are aged between 16 and 18 and wish to work in F1, you need to be strong in arithmetic, which does not seem to be the strength of candidates applying at Williams.
Williams has implemented an apprenticeship program that allows young candidates to work within its F1 team. However, it is facing a very high failure rate on a basic arithmetic test, which limits its growth in the UK.
The situation on this subject is so serious that the team has now decided to only administer this test as the final element of recruitment, rather than giving it to all candidates right away, since the failure rate was too high to justify being given to so many candidates. A few years ago, only 6 out of 200 candidates managed to achieve at least 50% correct answers.
The situation this year has not improved much. Indeed, the HR department of the team received 250 applications for this year’s session. It decided to invite 45 of them for an open day at its Grove headquarters and to submit 16 finalists to the famous tests. Among them, only six candidates achieved the necessary score, resulting in a failure rate of more than two-thirds…
Axel Burns, the CEO of the British company, thus declared to The Telegraph: « It’s quite frustrating that young people are not able to pass these tests. A few years ago, we had such a low success rate that now we only administer it after inviting them to an open day. »
This poses significant problems for the company’s management as it is not able to train enough people with the necessary qualities for the stable’s expansion. However, Williams is now a publicly traded team involved in many other activities derived from its expertise acquired in F1. « Finding the personnel we need to fill technical positions is probably our biggest constraint for the growth of our company at the moment. We are a profitable company. So we reinvest them in the company, and I see many opportunities to take F1 technologies and adapt them for use outside the company. Our biggest constraint is finding the people we need with the skills we require. »
This issue therefore prompts the leader to call on the government to completely overhaul the educational system in the country. Indeed, currently, the multiple-choice question format has skewed the students’ way of thinking: from a young age, they are trained to eliminate the two obviously wrong answers, leaving them with a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the correct answer instead of directly solving the question posed. Axel Burns states: « We take people and give them the skills they need. What we expect from the government is a very strong educational system that provides us with young people with strong skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We will then give them the specific skills to thrive within our company. »
For those who want to see what young people face when they appear at Williams, here are the fifteen questions from the famous test:
44 + 12 + 35 = ?
2,735 – 576 = ?
3. 7523 x 8 = ?
4. 7713 / 9 = ?
5. 2 + 3 = ?
6. Write 0.3 as a fraction
7. The square of 7 is = ?
8. The cube of 2 is = ?
9. What is 11% of 250 = ?
10. Increase 64 by 12.5% = ?
11. Find the value of x² + 2xy + y² where x = 6 and y = -3
12. (5/16) / (1/8) = ?
13. If log 3 = 0.4771 and log 4 = 0.6020, log 40 = ?
14. If log 3 = 0.4771 and log 4 = 0.6020, log 0.12 = ?
15. The cube root of 27 is = ?
With the participation of www.Racingbusiness.fr
