4. Synthesizing the skills lists

Over the past ten years, a large number of education- and labour-related organizations have undertaken projects to identify employability skills. These include national, state, and provincial government agencies, school districts, and public and private research institutions. Due to this large number, a choice was made to examine a set of these documents that were believed to be representative of the larger group in terms of methodology and findings. These documents include:

• People and Skills in the New Global Economy (Premier's Council, 1990)
• Putting General Education to Work: The Key Competencies Report (Committee to Advise the Australian Education Council, 1993)
• Michigan Employability Skills Profile (Pestillo and Yokich, 1988)
• Conference Board Employability Skills Profile (McLaughlin, 1992)
• Workplace Basics: The Skills Employers Want (Carnevale, Gainer, and Meltzer, 1988) (developed for the American Society for Training and Development)
• Work Keys (American College Testing, 1997)
• What Work Requires of Schools (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991) (a report of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS)
• National Council on Vocational Qualifications Core Skills (Oates, 1992) (a system developed for use in the United Kingdom)
• Essential Skills Research Project (http://www15.hrdc-drhc.gc.ca/English/general/esrp.asp) (a project for Human Resources Development Canada)

The methodology used by these and most of the other studies is generally to start from a broad definition (e.g., "a skill applicable to a wide range of jobs and contexts") and then survey or observe workers, supervisors, and experts to determine what skills are common. Those that pass some test of "frequent enough" across occupations qualify for inclusion in the final list of skills. Aside from terminology, the main differences among the final products have been level of detail and structure. Some simply list a skill (e.g., "reading") while others provide a fuller description of that skill with examples of its application to various situations. Some of the lists provide a single set of skills, but many attempt some sort of categorization or hierarchy. For example, the Workplace Know-How from the U.S. Department of Labor's SCANS designates two categories: Foundation Skills, which include basic academic skills, thinking skills, and personal qualities; and Workplace Competencies, which include the ability to use resources, interpersonal skills, information, systems, and technology (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991). The Premier's Council Skills Triangle (1990) uses a hierarchy of transferability and generalizability: at the base are basic skills, which support workplace skills, and these in turn support job specific skills. The former two sets of skills are broadly transferable, while the latter set is not.

Despite these differences, a comparison across these lists reveals that they almost always cover the same range of concepts. It should then be possible to distil from them a limited set of categories into which most of the skills listed by any of the nine documents would fit. In some cases, a given list might not address all of the categories in the model, but in as few cases as possible should they contain a skill that does not fit within any of the specified categories.