Workers

This Overview is part of the Succession Planning for Literacy and Basic Skills Agencies and Networks - Toolkit, available at: http://library.copian.ca/item/8611.

In this document, The Alliance of Sector Councils (TASC) offers practical tips to help businesses minimize the impact of tough economic times on their organizations.

The suggestions are divided into three categories: holding on to the employees the business needs; avoiding layoffs altogether; and, as a last resort, handling layoffs in the best manner possible.

The READ Society’s Workplace Learning project, Phase 1, sought to explore and understand the issues that employers in British Columbia's Capital Region were having regarding hiring, retaining and promoting employees with lower literacy skills.

This report examines the current employer demand in the United States for older workers and explores how demand may be changing over time. It discusses the personal and social benefits of increased work by older adults, the reasons why baby boomers are likely to try to work longer than earlier generations, and whether employers appear to want older workers.

This short document contains thirteen tips for businesses and organizations on workplace literacy. These tips were published as part of Tracy Defoe's presentation "What Now?" at the Vancouver stop of the 2008 Literacy Tour of British Columbia. Tracy Defoe is with The Learning Factor Inc.

This is a report on a six-month research project that was conducted in the Niagara region of Ontario to determine the literacy needs specific to the over-40 job seeker in this community that must be addressed to remove them as barriers to employability and employment. The co-relationship between increasing age and lower level of literacy skill is well documented.

This resource about literacy in the workforce consists of the following five fact sheets:
- Introduction - literacy is a right
- Proven advantages for workers, employers, governments
- Labour’s vision for government support
- Best practices
- Measuring success - program evaluation, essential skills, TOWES

In the study presented here, researchers investigated the formal and informal training activities of basic level employees using a qualitative multi-site case study research design. For this purpose, researchers selected seven programs from Canada and four programs from the North and South of England from small, medium and large businesses.

In this booklet in the Connecting Research with Policy series, three key findings relating to learning and low-skilled workers are described. Below each finding, a brief paragraph entitled "policy implication" discusses what the key finding means in terms of workplace policies. The key findings discussed in this document are summarized as follows:

From October 2003 to June 2004, Literacy Network Northeast conducted a job creation partnership project in Northeastern Ontario entitled the Workforce Skills Training project. This project involved hiring twelve researchers in eight communities throughout Northeastern Ontario. These researchers worked in literacy and basic skills funded agencies gathering information on entry-level jobs in the local labour market and creating job profiles.