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Essential Skills

Understanding Essential Skills

Essential Skills are the skills needed for work, learning and life. They provide the foundation for learning all other skills and enable people to evolve with their jobs and adapt to workplace change.

Through extensive research, the Government of Canada and other national and international agencies have identified and validated nine Essential Skills. These skills are used in nearly every occupation and throughout daily life in different ways and at different levels of complexity.

There are nine Essential Skills:

1. Reading Text
   
2. Document Use
3. Numeracy
4. Writing
5. Oral Communication
6. Working with Others
7. Continuous Learning
8. Thinking Skills
9. Computer Use

To learn more about the complexity levels of Essential Skills, visit the Essential Skills Online Learning Tool.

Reading Text

Reading Text refers to reading material that is in the form of sentences or paragraphs.

Reading Text generally involves reading notes, letters, memos, manuals, specifications, regulations, books, reports or journals.

Reading Text includes:

• forms and labels if they contain at least one paragraph
• print and non-print media (for example, texts on computer screens and microfiche)
• paragraph-length text in charts, tables and graphs

Document Use

Document Use refers to tasks that involve a variety of information displays in which words, numbers, icons and other visual characteristics (eg., line, colour, shape) are given meaning by their spatial arrangement. For example, graphs, lists, tables, blueprints, schematics, drawings, signs and labels are documents used in the world of work.

If a document includes a paragraph of text such as on a label or a completed form, it is also included in A. Reading Text. Documents requiring the entry of words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs are also included in C. Writing.

Document Use includes:

• print and non-print media (for example, computer screen or microfiche documents, equipment gauges, clocks and flags)
• reading/interpreting and writing/completing/producing of documents-these two uses of
• documents often occur simultaneously as part of the same task, e.g., completing a form, checking off items on a list of tasks, plotting information on a graph, and entering information on an activity schedule.

Numeracy

Numeracy refers to the workers’ use of numbers and their being required to think in quantitative terms.

Writing

Writing includes:

• writing texts and writing in documents (for example, filling in forms)
• non-paper-based writing (for example, typing on a computer)

Oral Communication

Oral Communication pertains primarily to the use of speech to give and exchange thoughts and information by workers in an occupational group

Working with Others

Working with Others examines the extent to which employees work with others to carry out their tasks. Do they have to work co-operatively with others’ Do they have to have the self-discipline to meet work targets while working alone’

Continuous Learning

Continuous Learning examines the requirement for workers in an occupational group to participate in an ongoing process of acquiring skills and knowledge.

Continuous Learning tests the hypothesis that more and more jobs require continuous upgrading, and that all workers must continue learning in order to keep or to grow with their jobs. If this is true, then the following will become essential skills:

• knowing how to learn;
• understanding one’s own learning style; and
• knowing how to gain access to a variety of materials, resources and learning opportunities.

Thinking Skills

Thinking Skills differentiates between five different types of cognitive functions. However, these functions are interconnected.

Computer Use

Computer Use indicates the variety and complexity of computer use within the occupational group.