Research Note 3/21/00

Are We Facing a Literacy "Surplus" in the Workforces of the United States and Canada?

Thomas G. Sticht
Consultant in Adult Education

In planning for future action in the field of adult literacy education, the National Institute for Literacy in the United States has been preparing a "vision" paper with an action agenda. The March 21, 2000 version of the Draft National Literacy Summit 2000 foundation paper includes a number of "challenges" that the adult education and literacy field faces (National Institute for Literacy, 2000). One of these states: QUOTE "Challenge 3: The skills and knowledge needed in order to succeed in the workforce are constantly increasing. The demand for skilled workers far exceeds the current supply, and this trend will continue through the first decade of the 21st century.. All jobs are becoming more complex and requiring employees at all levels to continually upgrade their skills."UNQUOTE

In Canada and the United Kingdom, in the wake of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) similar concerns about literacy and workforce preparedness have been expressed.

However, as familiar as these claims about the supply and demands for skilled workers are by now, they are, to say the least, very contentious based on studies of the issues involved. On the one hand, consistent with the Draft National Literacy Summit 2000 foundation paper in the U.S., the widely heralded Hudson Institute report called "Workforce 2000" suggested that there would be a "skills gap" between the qualifications of workers and the changing job mix of the American economy by the year 2000 (Johnston & Packer, 1987).

But in 1998 in a paper entitled "Beyond 2000: Future Directions for Adult Education" (available at www.nald.ca under Full Text Documents) I noted that the fact that unemployment was at record lows ( less than 5 percent in the U.S.) suggested that most of those in the labor market looking for work had found some sort of job that they could perform with their existing skills. I reported that, using Department of Labor methods for estimating the Language and Mathematics requirements of jobs, a new Hudson Institute report entitled " Workforce 2020" (Judy & D'Amico ,1997), had uncovered what might be called a potential "basic skills surplus". Looking at 422 occupations in the U.S. the authors found that even though the growing occupations have fewer jobs for adults with lower basic skills, the majority (65 to 75 percent) of jobs still have demands roughly equivalent to reading or mathematics as learned by the 3rd or 6th grade in school.