LITERATURE REVIEW
“Workplace Literacy & Essential Skills — What Works and Why?”
The Centre for Literacy’s 2009 Summer Institute on workplace literacy and essential skills brought together policy-makers, providers and researchers at the forefront of a field that has been evolving over the past twenty years. During this period, many industrialized countries have adopted initiatives aimed at raising the skills of individuals at the low-skilled end of the workforce. The experience of two decades offers a wealth of information and insight now being tapped to design more effective interventions and achieve better outcomes in the 21st century.
This literature review was written to help anchor discussion at the 2009 Institute. Its starting point is a 2006 report, prepared by Alison Gray for the Department of Labour of the Government of New Zealand (see Bibliography). That report reviewed relevant international literature on workplace literacy and essential skills as part of a larger, three-year project aimed at “upskilling” the literacy, language and numeracy (LLN) skills of the New Zealand workforce at the low-skilled end. This literature review follows from Gray’s work; it surveys research, policy and practice documents from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand between September 2006 and April 2009. The sources examined comprise primarily research studies and reports, including some French-language materials. Most of the sources were available online at the time of writing (see Bibliography for web links).
The review is divided into the following five sections with a few Concluding Remarks:
The drivers behind workplace literacy and essential skills initiatives identified in Gray have
been quite clear since these were first undertaken in the 1990s. They include: workplace
changes (new work systems and processes, such as technological and product innovations, the
use of computers, e-mail communications and the Internet, team-working, more auditing,
compliance requirements and quality control, greater concern over health and safety hazards);
demographic shifts (ageing population, shrinking workforce); and broader, worldwide
developments (the globalization of the economy and competition). These factors, combined with
low literacy statistics published since the 1990s by the International Adult Literacy Survey
(IALS) and reports demonstrating “a strong plausible link between literacy and a country's
economic potential” have fed a “growing anxiety about global competition”
(Merrifield, 2007:
10). At the same time, some studies have suggested that countries that invest in skills training —
including training for the least educated — “will reap enormous benefits in terms of growth”
because such investment will translate into higher levels of productivity (CCL 2007a: 5; Myers
and de Broucker 2006: i, vi).