Erica Cumming

View comments from Erica Cumming, CEO Hairdressing and Beauty ITO, taken at the Literacy Forum in Wellington, May 2011.

Key content

Erica describes some benefits of addressing the numeracy gaps of people in the hairdressing beauty industry.

Transcript

We started to unpick that a lot of the people in the industry do have literacy gaps. A lot around numeracy and because the industry has changed a lot now in terms of mixing colour and working with obviously at the till, fractions, angles, that we realized there’s actually a lot of gaps for our people. And sometimes that’s affecting the bottom line of businesses. So we had a chance of engaging our salon owners to understand the issues that were perhaps facing them and why businesses weren’t making some levels of profit.

If you hear peoples lives are changed because of it either in their workplace or at home, people that can now go home and read to their children or understand what their pay cheque actually says and that they can engage in a different way then it does make a difference.