3. Deriving Life Skills from lists of workplace skills

The existing body of work on skills necessary for employment success is clearly relevant for our purposes. This perspective has recently received increased attention through the release of several documents setting out lists of such skills ( Jones, 1996 ). These studies and reports cite a need to identify generalizable skills and abilities necessary to better prepare people for success in an ever-changing economy. In so doing, they call attention— sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly—to the emerging belief that traditional notions of "basic skills" are not sufficient for success in the workplace. Support for this belief can be found, for example, in the literature on workplace literacy, in which researchers have reported that common school-based notions of reading, writing, and arithmetic are not sufficient for the tasks that adults perform (Sticht, 1978; Mikulecky, 1982; Daggett, 1991). Other researchers looking at job performance found that even in a broadened sense, these three basic skills were not sufficient, and that other skills were also needed (Carnevale et al., 1988). Consequently, new terms and conceptions of basic skills began to emerge.

The term "basic skills" evolved into "employability skills" because these skills were almost always discussed in the context of the transition from school to work or the transition of the unemployed into employment. Although this term is sometimes limited only to those skills necessary for job entry, it usually covers the skills thought necessary to retain jobs to adapt to changes in the organization of work and technologies of production and to secure advancement, such as those that relate to attitude and work habits. Other terms found in the research include "enabling skills," "generic skills," "core skills," "key competencies," "essential skills," and "necessary skills." These different terms would seem to have slightly different implications, but they were often chosen to meet specific local circumstances and preferences, and, thus, are not related in any systematic way to differences in the way these skills were conceptualized. Despite the strong labour-market orientation of these terms and their sources, many of these documents either directly state or imply their relevance to life in general, making them candidates for "life skills."