7.2 The scenarios

Nicholas

Our first scenario involves Nicholas, who is a 23-year-old early school leaver, and who is currently working in a unionized hotel as a doorman. Nicholas is six courses short of obtaining a high-school diploma and has worked in the service industry for the past 6 years. He wants to improve his prospects by returning to school for hospitality management.

The first question we asked in relationship to Nicholas’s scenario was how he would gather information about his options for completing a high-school diploma. As we discovered in Section 4, access to easy-to-navigate, plain language information about high-school-related
options is hard to come by in most of the provinces examined in this study. As Table 7.1 shows, while all provinces except Ontario have a website targeted to adult learners, these websites are typically text heavy and hard to navigate. Nicholas would probably have the easiest time figuring out how to access information in Québec. Québec has a well-publicized adult learning telephone hotline and local adult education centres that provide face-to-face counselling. Alberta also has a hotline and service centres. The downside of Alberta’s hotline is that counsellors are trained to respond to a range of labour market and training scenarios and often do not have detailed information on adult learning. It may take more than one referral to find someone with the correct information. Neither British Columbia, Ontario, or Nova Scotia has an adult learning hotline. In these provinces, the only way prospective learners can gather information is to visit specific service providers. The drawback to this approach is that most agencies often only have information about their own services. Only Nova Scotia formally trains its information agents to ensure that they provide appropriate referrals. Therefore, once they figure out whom to contact, prospective learners in Nova Scotia have a relatively good chance of getting accurate and complete information.