Workplace Essential Skills

Summaries a portion of the research conducted under a two-year joint project of the American Society for Training and Development and the U.S. Department of Labor.

Presents the findings of a three-year ASTD/U.S. Department of Labor nationwide study on how to develop a skilled workforce capable of meeting today's business requirements. Explains how to implement training programs that develop the new basic skills workers will need.

Networking, negotiating, communicating, leading, career planning--all skills critical to your career success. But did anyone ever teach you these skills? The Career Toolkit will help you master these vital skills and yield outsized returns for your career and your income. Every chapter is packed with dozens of actionable principles, exercises, and practices that will accelerate your success. It's a multivitamin for your career! The Career Toolkit shows you how to design and execute your personal plan to achieve the career you deserve, including: Negotiating a job offer. (This alone will pay for the book.) Creating a dynamic career strategy. Building a high-value network. Developing the fundamental leadership skills that matter most. Managing teams effectively, even as an individual contributor.

The Measures of Success project developed and tested an evaluation model to assess longer-term outcomes of workplace education programs for increasing literacy and essential skills (LES). The model was tested in 18 Canadian work sites. This report (16 pages), from The Centre for Literacy, focuses on the longer-term results at 6-months after training onset. It reviews the design and implementation of the project and describes the profile of the participating businesses and workers and the training. It assesses changes in key participant and business outcomes which may have been affected by the LES training intervention. It explores the relationship between key contextual factors, the characteristics of participants and businesses, and the observed outcomes to offer further evidence of their link to training and to better understand the conditions that influence training success. Finally, this report recommended revisions to the research tools to make them more reliable instruments to capture outcomes of LES training, and to require less time from participants and employers. Table of contents: Part 1: Design and implementation * Chapter 1: Introduction * Chapter 2: Project design * Chapter 3: Project implementation and training profile * Chapter 4: Sample characteristics and contextual factors Part 2: Changes in participant and business outcomes * Chapter 5: Intermediate outcomes - human, psychological and social capital * Chapter 6: Longer-term participant and business outcomes * Chapter 7: Understanding training success factors: Context, characteristics and process * Chapter 8: Business contrasts: Understanding site-level differences Part 3: Recommendations and conclusions * Chapter 9: Data quality and recommendations for future instruments * Chapter 10: Concluding summary Appendices (Guidelines for using the learner question inventory, question inventory for learners, guidelines for using the question inventory: interviews with employers and workplace educators, question inventory for interviews with employers and workplace educators).