Get Set Learn - Everything You Need to Run a Family Literacy Program

Essential Skills

Essential skills (ES) are the skills needed for work, learning and life. They provide the foundation for learning all other skills and enable people to evolve with their jobs and adapt to workplace change. They were developed in 1994 and through extensive research, these skills have been validated by the Government of Canada and other national and international agencies. These skills are used in nearly every occupation and throughout daily life in different ways and in different levels of complexity.

There are nine essential skills including:

Reading Text
Document Use
Numeracy (math)
Writing
Oral Communication
Working with Others
Continuous Learning
Computer Use
Thinking Skills

Thinking skills can be broken up into six different areas including:

Problem-solving
Decision making
Critical thinking
Job task planning and organizing
Significant use of memory
Finding information (Sauve and Tuer, 2005).

You will find the essential skills that are included in each lesson listed in the “Special Notes and/ or Extensions” section. This will allow you to cross-reference the essential skills with other literacy skills.