LiteracyExpress Canadian Literacy and Learning Network
Summer 2012
upskilling the workforce
Literacy and essentiaL skiLLs i in today’s workpL ace
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LiteracyExpress Summer 2012
in this issue: cLLn news 4 Update: cLLn Labour Market study 4 cLLn on parliament Hill
editor’s note FocUs: the workplace 4 jobs oF tHe FUtUre: review 4 tHe baLancinG act 4 workpLace cULtUre: MappinG it 4 expLorinG tHe everyday experience oF work 4 oLes resoUrce: takinG action 4 Learners’ viewpoint’
cLLn MeMbers’ corner this newsletter is published by
Canadian Literacy and Learning Network 342A Elgin Street Ottawa, ON K2P 1M6 CLLN is funded by the Government of Canada's Office of Literacy and Essential Skills
Welcoming new staff
Tony Mark joined CLLN as a Project Manager for our Labour Market Study of Literacy and Essential Skills Workers which is being conducted nationally in 2012-2013. He brings extensive experience in project and research management as well as many years working in both the public and private sectors in areas related to human resource development, training & professional development and e-learning. He is working out of his home office in Ancaster, Ontario and can be reached via e-mail: tmark@literacy.ca With us for the summer months, as research and communications assistant, is Geneviève Tilden. She is a graduate student at Carleton University, re-directing her research expertise to develop CLLN’s framework to facilitate life-long place-based learning communities. She too can be reached via e-mail: researcherclln@gmail.com.
cLLn Labour U p d at e Market study During the first few months of the Labour Market Study of Literacy and Essential Skills workers, CLLNs focus has been on gathering the team to bring together the profile of the L/ES workforce. With Project Manager Tony Mark joining in late April, a Request for Proposals process in May for the lead consultant to conduct the survey and the creation of a national Advisory Committee, the work is well under-way. e first meeting of the Advisory Committee was held in Ottawa earlier this month and key decisions were made about the process for surveying key informants and on-going communications. Comprised of leaders in the L/ES field, the Advisory Committee includes members from: 4 Canadian Society for Training and Development 4 RESDAC - Réseau pour le développement 4 HR Council for the Non-Profit Sector
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4 Skillplan – BC Construction Industry Skills Improvement Council 4 Government of Nova Scotia Labour and Advanced Education (Workplace Initiatives) Department 4 Saskatchewan Literacy Network 4 Simon Fraser University e next major steps in the project will be to create a database of L/ES workers that is large enough to allow us to survey up to 3000 L/ES workers. Field-testing of the survey should begin in the fall and the survey will be conducted in late 2012 and early 2013. Key informant interviews will also be conducted during the late summer and early fall of this year to gather more in-depth information for the study. For regular updates on progress visit
www.literacy.ca/research-and-resources or contact CLLN’s Labour Market Study Project Manager Tony Mark at tmark@literacy.ca .
LiteracyExpress Summer 2012
cLLn on parLiaMent G i v i n G eHiLL vidence CLLN was invited this month to give evidence at the parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development, to contribute to their studies into the Skills Gap and Labour Shortages. Here is Lindsay Kennedy’s full submission: Good afternoon. First I would like to thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this committee's studies. It is easy for me to address both study subjects, as they are so inherently connected: the foundation of strong literacy and essential skills is now absolutely necessary to enter the labour market at any level, and no workforce can acquire advanced skills without that quintessential foundation. I would like to point out, that low skill jobs as we used to know them have really disappeared, most of these jobs have been automated in the last decade and we have not equipped those who have traditionally occupied these positions to continue to partake in the labour market. What has emerged is the fact, that we have an ever widening gap between high and low skilled Canadians. In the internationally recognized scale of literacy and essential skills levels from 1 to 5 (and in danger of oversimplifying: imagine levels 1 and 2 as learning to read, and levels 3 and up as reading to learn) - level 3 is what has been established in the 2004 StatsCan /OECD collaborative survey (Adult Literacy & Life Skills Survey) as the minimum level Canada’s workforce needs to be at to allow Canadian business to stay competitive in a national as well as a global context. is is not only true for a new knowledge based economy, but transcends all sectors. And as is apparent now, moving into the future, the need for continuous upskilling will be ever more evident. e difficult reality that we are facing as a nation, and I know that this is by no means news to this committee, is that 43% of adult Canadians have literacy levels of below level 3. e ability of 9.8 million adults [2011 census data] in this country is severely compromised to fully participate in civic and work life. Looking for a long-term approach and opportunities at this critical point in time, CLLN has recently conducted research that explores the potential of an investment in adult literacy to reduce government and business expenditures on Employment Insurance,
Workers Compensation and Social Assistance benefits. We compared literacy statistics, income and earnings statistics and people in receipt of payments under those benefit programs. We found a strong correlation that suggests that the lower your level of literacy, the more likely you are to have to access these programs. We will be releasing a detailed analysis later this month - but here is a preview of some of the more striking findings: It would cost $16 billion to increase literacy levels of all working age adults to level 3. However, the return on this significant investment is in our view rather compelling: 4 Individuals' earnings could rise due to an increase in labour productivity by as much as $83.9 billion annually. 4 Employment Insurance, Workers Compensation and Social Assistance payments could drop by as much as $2.917 billion annually [EI - $330 million, Workers Compensation $487 million, Social Assistance - $2.1 billion]. 4 is combined annual increase and savings of $86.8 billion does not include government savings and increased revenue from income tax rolls. e Canadian Chamber of Commerce says that “ More people with advanced skills are needed for Canada to compete and prosper in a global, knowledge-based economy,” but you cannot build a skilled labour force without the basic foundational literacies and essential skills. Investments into those with low skill levels is required to achieve a long term solution. Investments in raising the literacy and skills levels provides a greater return on investment than moving people up between the higher literacy levels and ensures that more Canadians have what is needed to fill the skills gap. To fulfill Prime Minister Stephen Harper’ promise that he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of this year, namely that the Canadian government will move ahead with “transformations necessary to sustain economic growth, job creation and prosperity now and for the next generation,” we need a pan-Canadian human capital strategy. is strategy must have the goal of a Canadian workforce with advanced skills at its center, and that goal can only be built on a strong foundation of literacy and essential skills. ank you.
If you haven’t yet - check out our on-line forum for practitioners: go to http://educators.alphaplus.ca - Locate, and click on CLLN Forum; login or register Thank you for joining us and sharing your opinions. We are looking forward to meeting you online.
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note editor’s
It’s been again a busy few months since the last LiteracyExpress. Much of our efforts outside of the day-to-day work, which is exciting and plentiful in itself, has been making sure that the voice of Literacy and Essential Skills has been audible in all those places where leaders are grappling with the challenge of positioning Canada’s economy and citizens’ well being for the future. We presented to Parliament and Canadian business. e skills gap is on everybody’s mind and CLLN is an active participant in the discussions to finding a solution, While everybody who is anybody in our field is attending the Centre for Literacy’s Summer Institute in Montreal - this year’s theme being Workplace Literacy and Essential Skills (check out twitter #SIMtl or partake in the discussion on the blog: http://cflsi2012.wordpress.com), we thought it would be a good time to support and contribute to the discussion by focusing on all things workplace related in this issue of LiteracyExpress.
is jam-packed issue talks about everything: from skills gap and job market prognosis to all aspects of delivering programs in the workplace; we profile tools for businesses to assess their own need for training and are sharing insights from our Adult Learners Focus Group about their experience of workplace Literacy and Essential Skill programming. And we have added a new feature: the members’ corner, where we invite our membership to make announcements, share accomplishments and list important events. Last but not least I would like to thank Ashley Counsell, Tracy Defoe and Diana Twiss for their contributions to this issue, sharing their invaluable experiences, giving this issue a truly rounded, pan-Canadian view of workplace L/ES training delivery. Enjoy! ANNeTTe HeGeL
review
Learning for the Future
Jobs of the Future: Options and Opportunities A research report by Dr. Rick Miner “We are about to encounter a crisis that will challenge our economic well-being and shake the foundations of our institutions and social structures. We cannot escape the changes that lie just in front of us, despite how much our current economic woes may distract us from this reality. We cannot escape, but we can prepare. e effectiveness of our response or plan depends upon the creativity and determination we are prepared to apply to meeting this challenge.” us starts Rick Miner’s most recent report on the state of the nation, Jobs of the Future. In it he details the good and the bad when it comes to job opportunities, job preparedness and the skills gap in Canada. Miner is picking up the thread he started two years ago in his report People Without Jobs, Jobs Without People, where he warned that time is of the essence. Aptly illustrating then the advent of a perfect storm - a declining working age population colliding with the emergence of the
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knowledge economy, that will require a workforce that has to have post secondary credentials (be it through apprenticeships, university, college, industry initiatives), the numbers clearly showed that Canada was not ready to meet that challenge. "By 2011, the problem Will begin to appear. And if we delay our response, then we will find that when we are ready to grow we will be constrained by a workforce that is out of balance with the needs of our economy. e time for action is now" was his conclusion to that report. It is two years later and ‘skills gap’ and ‘labour shortage’ are terms that have made their way into daily media reports, public policy discussions and personal conversations. While , increasing immigration, relying on technology and raising the age of normal retirement are temporary band-aids, Miner is coming back with a concrete suggestion as part of a long term solution. is time with even more urgency than in 2010:
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he makes it very clear that if we want more people to participate in formal post secondary education that system needs a complete overhaul, all the while “creating new partnerships among parties that have hitherto not worked together”. At the heart for long-term planning, Miner suggests the founding of a Centre for Research, Economic Development and Advanced Curriculum Design, an entity that would bring various actors together in a working relationship. As a regional institution, such a Centre,”with a small permanent staff, would be tasked with coordinating the major players in the community (community groups, educational institutions, governments, businesses, labour), helping them to identify long-term strategies working with their educational partners to develop curriculum that would move the community forward. A significant output of the Centre would be the development of curricula relevant to an economy in transition. is would be available to universities and colleges in both the public and private sectors, and to business. e intention would be to assist our post-secondary institutions, with the help of business, adapt more quickly and more effectively to the changing needs for relevant market-ready graduates.” is, Miner points out, would allow communities to have a pro-active approach to their social and economic development.
By no means does Miner suggest that this would be the only solution, but he sees this as a start for discussion and he invites further engagement. What needs to be part of the discussion around a fundamental redesign of Canada’s post secondary system is a hard, honest look at the feeders, the K to 12 systems, where so many students fall through the cracks for various reasons. It definitely seems to be the perfect opportunity and point in time for the L/ES community to get involved in discussions and planning, to broaden the focus far beyond formal post secondary education, so any new national adult education framework will be able to engage all, even the most marginalized communities. DR. RICK MINER has over 35 years of experience working in Canada’s post-secondary sector. He was most recently the President of Seneca College, and before that held senior administrative positions at the University of New Brunswick and Saint Mary’s University. He is now a principal at Miner and Miner Management Consultants. To download and read both reports in their entirety, please visit http://www.minerandminer.ca/
proGraM deLivery in tHe workpLace
e Balancing Act essential Skills training programs delivered in the workplace require a multi-level assessment process that allow our experts to familiarize themselves with the workplace culture, understand the tasks of a specific job and gain an understanding of what the employer and employees expect to gain from a training program. Workplace Essential Skills are important to employers because they want to see their employees develop and because they see the benefit for their organization. Connecting organizational needs (e.g. increasing productivity) to individual learner needs
Ashley Counsell
(e.g. learning to use complex documents) demonstrates how investing in employees can meet the business needs of an organization. When employers’ expectations are met, businesses begin selling the concept of workplace training within their community. is has benefits to individual learners, their community and the workplace.
continued on page 5
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e Balancing Act continued If any of you have wondered how to develop a workplace training program that addresses the employer’s workplace challenges at the same time as meeting the essential skills needs of the employees, I would like to share our experiences of how we enjoy this success. As you might imagine, the employer’s expectations are not necessarily the same as the employees. ere is certainly a bit of a juggling act to find the balance that connects the two.
In essence, the identified job-specific tasks and gathering of authentic workplace materials are the means by which our practitioners teach literacy and essential skills while meeting the needs of employers. In the end, we are able to balance the training objectives of employers and employees. Both groups often recognize that the skills the employees learn at work are skills they can take home and into their community.
How It Works We begin with a training needs assessment process which provides an understanding of the organizational needs. We address these needs directly in the Essential Skills training by beginning with an examination of the job requirements for the targeted occupation(s) and developing an Essential Skills Profile. Essential Skills Profiles are linked to the National Occupational Classification system and follow a scale of complexity. e process of creating a firm (workplace) specific profile allows us to identify the skill levels for the tasks required for the targeted occupation. Once we have this benchmark established we meet one-onone with the adult learners. Operating from a strength-based approach we utilize a series of assessment tools to recognize the skills that they have already attained and gaps that may exist. is data helps us to conduct a gap analysis which allows us to begin the process of customizing training. roughout delivery, trainers monitor individual learning objectives (which are related to their job tasks as per the jobspecific profile) as well as the overarching training objectives which meet the employer’s expectations.
Administrative Guidelines, Workplace Essential Skills Program. Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour. Province of New Brunswick.
Ashley Counsell, Workplace Essential Skills Regional Coordinator, Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour. Province of New Brunswick Ashley Counsell has been working with the Department of Post-secondary Education, Training and Labour since 2007 where she focused her work on providing employment services to unemployed and underemployed New Brunswickers’. Prior to this she worked with the Department of Social Development in the Career Development Opportunities Branch. Ashley holds a bachelors degree in Psychology and Sociality and is currently working on her Masters degree in Education. Ashley has worked with the WES program since 2009 as a Regional Coordinator where she has led her team through the development of multiple training initiatives in the workplace and throughout her community in Central and Western New Brunswick.
Share your work with the network! Let us know about resources, new research or the work you are doing. Contact Annette Hegel at ahegel@literacy.ca to get your info out nation-wide in LiteracyExpress or on www.literacy ca.
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practitioners in tHe workpLace Workplace Culture: Mapping it GPS for Workplace Practitioners
Tracy Defoe
Have you ever been invited to a workplace that you thought would be familiar, and found yourself in unfriendly territory? Or maybe you have been sent to a workplace by your organization to lead a literacy or essential Skills group with only a sketchy picture of what the place is like, and why training is currently being offered to these workers? Being a workplace practitioner, you are a guest, and sometimes a change agent in lots of work cultures. I have always found this to be one of the best parts of the job. We are explorers.
organization? Your funder? Better get that in the picture, or you could end up going in circles.
I want to share with you one of the ways I deal with my culture learning curve in a workplace – through mapping. And I want to give you the GPS to go with your map —Good Practice Solutions. I find that with a map and GPS, I don’t get too far off track.
Part of the value of mapping that it can literally draw assumptions to the foreground. Mapping is also adaptable as a planning and communication tool. Just keep your GPS, Good Practice Solutions, at hand. In our Embedding Literacy and Essential Skills in the Workplace study we used mapping to find opportunities for our action research. In our guidebook, How to Embed Literacy and Essential Skills in the Workplace, we show a map and share the lessons learned in that multi-year project.
The basics of GPS are simple. Know that the work culture is not necessarily your culture. Admit to yourself that you are on a learning curve to understand the people and the place. Pay attention to what people say, say they do, actually do, and how they group. Observe. Listen. Ask naive questions like, “How does this work here?” Notice the local jargon, the acronyms, the power words. Write your observations down. Make a visual. You can see clusters and how things connect or flow in a map. I like to draw a free hand diagram that looks like a map. As long as you can read it, and you could show it to someone, it works as a map. Find the true north to orient the map. What is the guiding light for the place? Is it productivity improvement? Greater participation? Flexible workers? Name it and mark it on the map. Do you have different true north and does your
ink, and puzzle over what you have observed. Make notes after conversations or interviews. Write on your lesson plans, if you get as far as lessons. Reflect on your actions and add to the map. Refine the picture as you get more detail. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this, but neglecting it and relying only on your memory could leave you in the weeds rather than on the road you agreed to trail-blaze or cruise.
Tracy Defoe and The Learning Factor Inc. work with forward-thinking companies, community organizations and their partners on the learning and literacy challenges of the workforce. Her work typically involves research, program design and development, delivering customized training, teaching peer trainers, evaluation and being a catalyst for change. Tracy was one of the researchers on Decoda Literacy Solutions Society’s Embedding Literacy and Essential Skills in the Workplace project. TLFI – The Learning Factor Inc. is a Canadian organization dedicated to making business and labour smarter about learning through innovations in workplace education. It's the home of workplace education consultant Tracy Defoe. To find out more visit http://www.thelearningfactor.ca/
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tion-researcH project in tHea cworkpLace
exploring the everyday experience of Work Embedding Literacy and Essential Skills in the Workplace – is an action-research project borne in part out of the disappointment of setting up workplace programs, running them for a few years and then watching them end as soon as the funding stopped. It also came from the frustration of those instances where we couldn’t even get a program running. Despite the need for training and increasing the skills of the workers, a strong commitment from management to support it, and buy-in from workers, too often one of the results of the needs assessment is the realization that because of the structure of the workplace, their operational requirements and the working day, it is impossible to mount a workplace program. What then? We decided we needed to find a new strategy, one with a sustainable approach that would seamlessly fit into the rhythms of the work environment. At the heart of this idea are the following facts: 4 everyone in the workplace is learning all the time, sometimes not positively 4 realistically, you can never have enough time or money to really support the few learners who commit to a learning program and attend 4 CEO’s have observed that their managers learned a great deal of highly useful stuff interacting with a workplace learning professional So by inserting workplace learning professionals into three sectors – Healthcare, Corrections and Aboriginal Friendship Centres – we explored the idea of embedding and looked at what it would take to get people in a workplace environment to consider how a wee focus on literacy and essential skills could help them do their jobs more safely, more productively and with greater joy. We figured that rather than targeting the workers with lower literacy skills, we would look at the entire working environment and see places where people were getting stuck, transitions were taking place or things were going wrong. What was going on in these moments? And to what extent did people’s reading, writing, math, communication skills (or lack of ) have an effect on what was taking place?
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Diana Twiss
In asking this simple question, we learned several things. First, when we think about literacy and essential skills, we tend to focus on people’s reading ability. If they don’t understand something or if they misunderstand, it must be because they have a low reading level. e second thing we learned was that, because of the focus on people’s reading ability, we were failing to notice that a lot of the material is poorly written. e reason people didn’t understand the company policy was largely because it was so badly written. And because of this, many of the workers wouldn’t or couldn’t read it in its entirety. We also learned that oftentimes things were going wrong, or appeared to be going wrong because no one could agree on the way that something was to be done – it had never been written down. And it had not been written down because the folks doing the work didn’t like writing, and the folks in charge didn’t know this was the reason for inconsistency. We also learned that most people in a workplace think skills training is for the other guy, not for them. What we managed to do in our project was to get people thinking about their work, what they had to do, and what ways their skills were having an impact on the process or task being done at work. We asked them to think about different or better ways to do it, and to even question if it needed to be done at all. What we witnessed was the beginnings of shift in culture, and shift in their systems as their awareness about literacy and essential skills grew. is project ends in September, but it will go on in various ways. For the real lasting change is from the system change in the everyday lived experience of work. Diana Twiss is the Director of Adult and Workplace Learning at Decoda Literacy Solutions. Decoda Literacy Solutions is BC’s literacy organization. Formed in 2011 it brings together the rich history of Literacy BC and the literacy arm of 2010 Legacies Now Society. More information about this project and the resources produced can be found on the decoda.ca website in September 2012.
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oLes tooLs in tHe workpLace Taking Action: A Guide Integrating essential Skills Training into the Workplace In today's knowledge-based economy, businesses that develop their employees' skills will reap the benefits. Improving essential skills can help boost the productivity, innovation and overall competitiveness of your business. It is never too early or too late to start investing in your employees.
How to do it
Implement a plan of action
Integrating essential skills into your business practices does not have to be time consuming or complicated. To help you get started, use Taking Action: A Guide that outlines a step-by-step process — including helpful strategies and useful tips — for developing and integrating essential skills training in the workplace
Once you have completed a needs assessment, identified your employees' training objectives, and considered the most effective way to engage your staff, it's time to implement your essential skills training plan. Here are a few tips:
Identify needs e first step in developing an effective training strategy is to create a skills development plan using worksheets and checklists such as the Organizational Needs Assessment. It can help you:
4 Assume a leadership role and lead by example 4 Gain employee buy-in by making the training relevant to the job and focusing on the needs of your employees 4 Limit barriers to develop and secure employee participation — participation fosters ownership, improves credibility and encourages employees to become champions of the program Whether you are just starting your business or planning for growth, implementing either a targeted or broader program to boost essential skills can help your business prosper.
4 Identify the skills required for your business 4 Identify the skill strengths or areas that may require improvement among your staff 4 Make informed decisions about training and learning in the workplace
To learn more about essential skills and to access helpful guides, checklists and worksheets, check out the Office of Literacy and essential Skills' website.
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viewpoint Learners’ In April 2012, CLLN engaged a consultant to facilitate discussion among a group of adults who had participated in workplace/workforce education and training. e Focus group participants were gathered from across Canada. e outcome of the session was to inform policy development at CLLN from the consumer or client perspective. e overwhelming message from Focus Group participants was that students (individuals who participant in L/ES programs) should have a voice in the development of L/ES programming in Canada. Further, students are interested in making programs more responsive, of a consistently high quality and more accessible. Students’ experiences, insights and opinions are important and valuable for informing program design, teaching approaches and policy development for adult education and training. Students want to participate during the development of L/ES training, along with government, business, labour and educators. ey believe that key stakeholders should actively participate in the creation of a Canadian L/ES system that meets adult
education principles and supports workers to gain skills and knowledge for the ever-advancing demands of the economy and society.
Working lunch during April 2012 focus group meeting
LookinG aHead
w H at ’ s c o M i n G y o U r w ay e CLLN office is working away busily over the summer months. Here is a list of activities coming down the pipe before the Fall Issue (focus: Building Lifelong Learning Communities):
By late summer, you can look forward to perusing the 2012 State of the Field Report which will give you an indepth look at the capacity of the pan-Canadian Literacy and essential Skills Network as well as better understanding of the broader economic, social and political environment relevant to achieving economic well-being and an inclusive, prosperous Canada. We are working on an annotated catalogue and video trailers of tools out of the vast OLeS vault of L/eS tools making sure that no awesome tool gets forgotten!
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We are tackling the issues of Social Impact Bonds and Social Return on Investment to make sure that the Field is well informed and has mechanisms in place to respond to this trend in funding solutions in the future. We are preparing fact sheets and will hold online information sessions later this summer. email ahegel@literacy.ca if you want to be on the mailing list for detailed information and advance notice of online sessions.
early September will see the long awaited release of the study-guide to accompany “ellen’s Story” - the manuscript is getting a last look-over from Jenny Horsman’s expert eye - making sure that it is going to be the best resource it can be. for updates and announcements, make sure you follow us on
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cLLn MeMbers’c o r n e r workpLace sUpport & traininG in saskatcHewan Training employees not only boosts their confidence, but helps build the skills necessary to their success; thus, improving the bottom line of businesses everywhere. For every 1% increase in literacy skills, productivity has been known to increase by 2.5%, which means that employees are better equipped to help businesses succeed (Public Investment in Skills: Are Canadian Governments Doing Enough?, C.D. Howe Institute, 2005). Through skills training and employer commitment to the development of essential skills, workplaces are building a workforce that is ready for success in the 21st Century. Essential skills are key to the development of all other skills used at work, at home, and in the community. The nine essential skills are: reading; document use; numeracy; writing; oral communication; working with others; thinking critically; computer use; and continuous learning. It is crucial that every person have a strong foundation of learning that is built upon these skills.
bibLioGrapHy oF workpLace Literacy MateriaLs Decoda Literacy Solutions’ Library has created an annotated bibliography of workplace literacy materials of interest to educators, tutors, practitioners and anyone who is interested in workplace literacy. Every item on this list is available, either from the Decoda library or online. Click here to link to bibliography.
The Saskatchewan Literacy Network provides support and training to workplaces that continue to invest in their employees, which helps keep that bottom line healthy. We work with employers to bring an understanding of essential skills, link them to community partners, and provide them with the tools to invest in the essential skills of their workforce. Improving the essential skills of all employees helps workplaces benefit from improved workplace safety, competence, job satisfaction, and employee retention. Contact Karen Rosser at 1-888-511-2111 or Karen.Rosser@sk.literacy.ca to find out more about how essential skills programming will improves the workplace (www.sk.literacy.ca). The Saskatchewan Literacy Network is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy and learning in Saskatchewan workplaces.
HirinG aboriGinaL Literacy coordinator Literacy Partners of Manitoba is looking to fill an Aboriginal Literacy Coordinator Contract position. Closing date for applications is noon CST Friday July 6, 2012. To find out more about this job, please click here
new strateGy, Mission, vision and brand To better find the most innovative methods of training, the Ontario Literacy Coalition (OLC) is thrilled to announce it is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a new strategy, mission, vision and brand, including a new name: Essential Skills Ontario and website - www.essentialskillsontario.ca. The organization’s new strategy reaffirms its commitment to work to find the most innovative and effective methods of providing literacy and essential skills training to adults in Ontario. The world has changed drastically over the past 25 years: the rapid advancement of technology and changing workplaces means adults must have a wider range and higher levels of literacy and essential skills than they had 25 years ago. The organization’s new brand will allow it to speak
to all the essential and evolving skills adults need to find or keep work, participate in their communities and lead a full life. “Our Board of Directors and staff are thrilled to become Essential Skills Ontario. Our new name and brand allow us to expand the reach of the organization and better achieve our mission of inspiring and leading the development of literacy and essential skills solutions,” says Lesley Brown, Executive Director of Essential Skills Ontario. In honour of our 25th anniversary, Essential Skills Ontario will be releasing new reports, white papers and numerous webinars that will showcase new ideas around education and training for adults - please stay tuned and visit our website often.
CLLN Membership If you aren’t already a member, or haven’t renewed your membership, please click here for the membership form on the CLLN website. We have two types of membership available – general and organizational. If you have any questions about becoming a member, or renewing your membership, please call the office at 613-563-2464 or email us at clln@literacy.ca.
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