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Workplace Digital Essential Skills in Rural Small Businesses is a national pilot project that was administered by the Restigouche Canada Business Development Corporation (CBDC) from January 2012 to March 2016. The original concept was to develop a flexible training model that would increase access to basic workplace digital skills training in small rural businesses that would be suitable for low literacy workers. Many employees with low literacy in small and medium-sized organizations in rural areas are known to lack digital skills and have little access to basic digital skills training that would allow them to fully participate in an increasingly technological economy. In response to this gap, Restigouche CBDC, in concert with a private learning software developer, created an online digital skills training platform. This is the product that was piloted and assessed in this project, with a view to wider distribution in the future. The purpose of this report is to present results of the analysis by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation, which assesses the success of the implementation on a number of pre-determined indicators and describes the outcomes of participants and their employers. The first chapter presents an overview of the project including the rationale, objectives, and target groups. The second chapter describes the training process, the research framework, and the accompanying data collection activities that support the evaluation of the implementation and outcomes of participants and employers. The third chapter provides a profile of participating workers and their organizations as well as a description of the training that was taken. Chapters four and five present the results of the analysis, relating to, respectively, the indicators of successful implementation followed by the outcomes of participants and employers along with an analysis of the factors that were found to contribute to these outcomes. The final chapter presents a concluding summary.

The highlights document outlines the project objectives, research questions, and the workplace piloting process, and presents the key findings.

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A clear understanding of the youth labour market situation is essential as a basis for appropriate policy initiatives related to youth employment. This paper provides an overview of youth labour market and human capital trends in the 1980s and 1990s. The paper is predominantly based on Statistics Canada labour market statistics for the 15-24 year old age group, however, as the transition from school to work is often prolonged, young people aged 24-29 years have been included in some parts of the analysis. The first section briefly reviews demographic trends specific to youth population levels and shares. The following section provides a detailed discussion of the main labour market indicators: labour force participation, employment and underemployment. The report then focuses on the effects of educational attainment on labour market outcomes, the industrial and occupational employment patterns of youth over the period of 1981-1994, trends in education enrolment and youth training participation, and youth earnings. The data suggests that the labour market experiences of young people have been on a downward trend and that education is the best solution for young people. In the 1990s, post-secondary enrolment increased dramatically and the proportion of young people with no schooling beyond the secondary level decreased markedly. The data suggests that those young people who do not undertake post-secondary education will experience difficulty in the labour market and the evidence suggests that this disadvantage is growing. Show less

A significant gap in information related to the profile and needs of the literacy and essential skills (LES) workforce was identified in two Canadian studies. To fill this gap, the Canadian Literacy and Learning Network (CLLN), conducted a labour market study of the adult education workforce. The goal of the survey was twofold: (1) to provide a national comprehensive picture of LES practitioners and their human resource needs; and (2) to contribute to the national labour market study of this workforce being conducted by CLLN. This report provides an overview of the survey and summarises the findings. The characteristics and professional lives of educators working in the Canadian adult literacy profession are discussed. Key findings include: LES practitioners face a diverse set of service delivery challenges; the proportion of LES practitioners who are 55 years and older is high and indeed higher than in the Canadian workforce at large; while practitioners are highly educated and a majority feel LES credentials are important, only a minority have received specific LES-related certifications - this is likely due to lack of options in this respect; nearly three-quarters of practitioners recommended the creation of additional forms of public recognition, including province-wide certification and a national professional status for LES practitioners; and while a large majority of LES practitioners reported receiving some form of professional development support from their employers, only about half have received financial support in terms of tuition, other training costs, or paid release time. Recommendations are made to address these issues.

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Measures of Success (MoS) is a national research project that designed and tested an evaluation framework to assess the longer-term outcomes of workplace literacy and essential skills initiatives in Canada. This final report documents the study and includes revised data-collection instruments based on findings and input from key stakeholders. Show less

This document reports on a national study on the factors influencing workplace training in Canada. The Ekos Workplace Training Survey investigated three major issues: the patterns of training activity in Canadian industry; the factors determining employer and employee decisions about investment in training; and, the impacts of training for employers and employees. The report demonstrates the benefits of training for both workers and organisations in relation to wages, self-confidence, and productivity, however, access to formal workplace training is very uneven. The report begins with a review of the literature on workplace training and a description of the research design. The analysis of workplace training is based on both quantitative and qualitative data collected during the survey. Findings are presented on training activities within Canadian industry and covering aspects such as the incidence of training, the balance between formal and informal training, and types and methods of training. The following section examines the training 'decision' and training processes within organisations and training outcomes from the perspective of both the employer and the employee. The report concludes with a summary of the survey results and a discussion of the policy implications for both governments and organisations. The authors identify some valuable advice for management emerging from the research and outline goals for public policy development in the area of workplace training. Show less

The workplace provides a central focus for many of the activities related to the knowledge-based economy. In this chapter, the authors briefly summarise the evidence on patterns of employer-sponsored training in Canada, describing patterns and highlighting where training investments are relatively large and where there appear to be disincentives to training investment. Disincentives are organised into externalities, information barriers, employee-based obstacles and a miscellaneous group. In each case, the theoretical arguments are discussed, and then the relevant Canadian empirical evidence is reviewed. The following section introduces a new empirical analysis of training obstacles reported by Canadian organisations, focusing on the part of the survey that questioned employers on the extent to which a number of potential obstacles to training were problems in their organisation. The final section presents the authors conclusions.

The full publication is indexed at TD/TNC 64.273, and selected chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 64.274 to TD/TNC 64.286. Show less

The UPSKILL Health and Mental Health Outcomes study (UPSKILL Health) is a sub-study of the original UPSKILL project, which the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) designed and implemented with support from the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills (OLES) at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC, formerly HRSDC). UPSKILL's purpose was to evaluate workplace Literacy and Essential Skills (LES) training using the most rigorous evaluation methods. This large-scale randomized control trial began in February 2010 and ran until February 2014. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) recently contracted with SRDC to undertake a two-phased sub-study to build on the existing UPSKILL demonstration project. The first phase involves an analysis of health-related data already collected through UPSKILL. The second phase is a qualitative inquiry involving key informant interviews and focus groups with a sample of UPSKILL participants. This report describes the development and empirical testing of a conceptual model of the relationships between literacy and essential skills and health in the workplace. The first section presents a review of the relevant literature in literacy, health, and employment, while the second section presents the project's overall methodology and the proposed conceptual model. The third section provides results from the analyses that have been conducted to date on UPSKILL baseline data sets.

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The decision to invest in workplace training, though complex, ultimately relates to the expected return on investment. Part of the challenge for employers and policymakers is that there are few high quality studies that have reliably measured the effects of literacy training or adequately measured its return on investment for employers, employees, and government. In an effort to fill this knowledge gap, the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills sponsored a large-scale, multiyear research project called UPSKILL to evaluate workplace essential skills training. The project resulted in important new evidence that helps establish the business case for workplace essential skills training.

A total of 88 firms in the accommodations and food services sector, primarily hotels, were randomly assigned to a program group where employees were offered a maximum of 40 hours of literacy and essential skills training on-site during working hours, or to a control group whose employees did not receive the training. As a result of the training delivered through the UPSKILL program, firms experienced gains in revenue, cost savings from increased productivity, and reductions in hiring costs that amounted to about $4,600 per participant. When firms are assumed to bear the full costs of training and release time for workers, their net benefit is $577 per participant, for an average return on investment of 23 per cent. Employees also experienced a substantial positive return on investment from UPSKILL training, as they bear few costs under the workplace delivery model. Earnings gains from increased job retention were significantly larger than the modest investment of personal time that participants devoted to complement the on-site training outside of working hours.

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This paper investigates the obstacles to employer investment in the training of their employees. This has become an area of interest in light of concerns over skill shortages, particularly in knowledge and technology intensive areas, and an awareness of the importance of lifelong learning in the workplace to innovation, productivity and competitiveness. The authors investigate these barriers within the context of a company’s decision making about training investment. The paper begins with a brief summary of patterns of employer-sponsored training in Canada that identifies types of companies where training investment is small. This is followed by a literature review of disincentives to training, in which four categories of disincentives, externalities, information problems, employee-based obstacles, and miscellaneous, are summarised in terms of key theoretical arguments and the existing empirical evidence of their importance. To supplement this review, the authors include some new outcomes on barriers to employer-sponsored training drawn from data from the national Workplace Training Survey (WTS) of employers conducted in 1995. The research reveals that, for many companies, disincentives do not lead to under-investment although a number of obstacles are significant to a small number of companies. The implications for policy makers are briefly discussed.

The copyright on this document is held by the Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN). Show less