Hi Ayodeji,

Thanks for getting in touch. It was a few years ago now when I did the numerical test, but I did quite a few across different applications and they are all quite similar. Here are some key things that you need to get comfortable with while preparing for the test:

- Business acumen/context and comprehension: You will never be asked a simple mathematical question like "What is the difference between x and y", it will always be in the context of a business. So you should get comfortable with the type of data they use in businesses such as monthly/annual charts for key metrics such as revenue, profit, costs, customer survey data etc. Also try to understand the more commonly known KPIs, although I wouldn't be too worried about learning formulas other than the very obvious ones like gross profit margin for example, as they aren't testing your ability to memorise formulas so they will not ask you about some obscure KPI without giving you a definition.

- Interpreting data: Typically, you will be presented with some illustrative business data (often visual) and asked questions about this. They are testing to see how quickly you can analyse data because, in your actual job, you will spend a lot of time looking at data and trying to draw conclusions. For example, it might be a bar chart which shows the sales of a company each year, and they might ask you which year saw the highest year-on-year growth. Or it might be survey results in a table, for example, customer feedback score on a 1-10 scale by customer age group, and they might ask you which age group had the lowest average score.

- Averages and percentages: In terms of actual calculations, most of the time you will be calculating averages and percentages. This is because a lot of the basic metrics used in businesses are based on averages and percentages, such as average order value or gross profit margin. I think I've had questions where they ask the mean, median and mode of a dataset for example. In terms of percentages, you need to be comfortable with how to calculate a percentage change between two numbers, as this always comes up - usually in the form of being asked about percentage growth.

Other than remembering those the best advice I can give you is to just practice, and practice under timed conditions. Not only does practice prepare you for the type of questions and how to answer them but it also means you will be far less nervous in the real assessment which means you'll be less likely to make mistakes. The best way to find practice questions unsurprisingly is to just look them up online. I've just done a quick Google search for numerical assessment practice questions and found loads.

Why not attend one of our Assessment and Selection events that our recruitment team are holding, which will provide you with some NRT style questions. You can sign up to one of these at www.ey.com/uk/events

Hope this was helpful!

03 October, 2023 09:54