Slide 07

What are Essential Skills?

• Skills people need for work, learning and life.
• Skills that provide the foundation for learning all other skills.
• Skills that enhance the ability to anticipate change and adapt to it.
• Skills that enable people to innovate, think critically, solve problems effectively, and make well considered and responsible decisions.
• Skills required by human beings to be able to cope, to develop their full capacities, to live and work in dignity, to participate fully and responsibly in sustainable development, to improve the quality of their lives, and to continue learning, all in the context of a global community.

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Slide 08

What are the Challenges?

European Union:

The great majority of adults will at some point in time be workers, learners, parents, careerists and participants in any number of political, cultural or leisure activities. The challenge is to make all citizens functional members of these different communities.

Canadian International Development Agency:

To enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life and enable people to continue learning and adapting throughout their lives, to act as responsible citizens, to understand their rights, to maximize livelihood opportunities, to work collaboratively, and to maintain their health and the health of their families.

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Slide 09

Essential Skills, HRSDC Classifications

• reading text
• using documents
• writing
• numeracy
• oral communication
• computer use
• working with others
• thinking skills
  • problem solving
  • decision making
  • critical thinking
  • job task planning and organizing
  • significant use of memory
  • finding information
• continuous learning

www15.hrdc-drhc.gc.ca

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Slide 10

Is it an Essential Skills issue?

Might not be:

• Sometimes it just means looking at the bigger picture.
• It might be a hidden issue such as a health or physical disability issue (e.g. colour blindness, dyslexia).
• It could be a cultural issue.
• It could be a gender issue.
• It could be an attitude problem or persona issue.

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Slide 11

Employability Skills & Essential Skills

Employability Skills:

• term coined by the Conference Board of Canada in 1992.
• compiled from the responses of employers to a Canada wide survey asking what employers think are the most important skills workers need.
• include the attitudes and behaviours employers look for.
• skills considered “essential” from the employer perspective.

www.conferenceboard.ca/education/learning-tools

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Slide 12

Essential Skills:

• now considered part of the list of employability skills
• compiled by the Government of Canada.
• based on structured interviews with fully competent workers.
• rated according to difficulty level.
• skills considered “essential” from the worker perspective.
• also called foundation, basic, cross-cutting, generic, transversal, enabling, core, critical, key, portable, skills

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