1. Introduction

Few people would argue against the idea that there are skills and abilities necessary for success in life. Asking people to name them, however, would generate a wide variety of responses. This should not be surprising, since skills and abilities important to one person may not be as important to another. Differences may arise from occupation (e.g., corporate executive vs. assembly line worker), lifestyle (e.g., head of a large household vs. single with no dependents), society and culture (e.g., industrialized vs. agrarian) or from differences in the dominant technologies of production and associated ways in which work is organized (eg.Tayloristic production versus high performance work groups). Despite these differences, there has been a great deal of interest in trying to look across individual and cultural contexts to identify and measure a common, definable core of necessary skills and abilities. This is where the Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey (ALL) begins—as an attempt to identify and measure a range of skills that are linked to social and economic success with the goal of developing profiles that capture variations across groups and the environments they in which they operate.

Understanding these empirical linkages is important for both public policy and individual choice (OECD and Statistics Canada 1995; OECD and HRDC 1997; OECD and Statistics Canada, 2000). First, skill is thought to be an important force driving both aggregate economic performance and inequality in educational, social and economic opportunity at the individual level. Skill is also thought to play a central role in the generation of and access to social capital (Bourdieu, 1977 and Coleman, 1988), and to support the development of, and access to, democratic institutions (Freire, 1970).

The designers of the ALL study did not begin with a blank slate. Recently, there has been a proliferation of efforts in the fields of education and labour to develop lists of skills, knowledge, and competencies necessary for success in the workplace and society. Thus, the effort could be as simple as reviewing these studies to identify the one that is most appropriate, or a set of skills common to most of them. As appealingly straightforward as this sounds, this body of research is not the only one relevant to this purpose. Indeed, over the past century, researchers from a variety of fields have sought to identify models and systems to describe concepts very similar to, if not the same as, life skills. Most prominent among these is the work that has been done to define human intelligence. Because current notions of intelligence extend well beyond academic knowledge, one might at first expect them to resemble the sets of employability skills identified by the education and labour researchers. Examining the two together, however, reveals striking contrasts in approaches and language. For example, predominant workplace skill models frequently originate from inventories of tasks encountered in jobs and everyday situations. On the other hand, models of intelligence seek to identify products and processes of abilities, referring to skills and tasks only as a means of exemplifying and measuring these abilities, or as subcategories of them.