Posted by wemadmin
on Tuesday, January 18, 2011.
So how do Essential Skills connect to the workplace?
Over the first few blogs I have discussed what Essential Skills are and why they are important.
Over the next few blogs, I want to start the discussion of the Essential Skills connection to business imperatives.
Ten years ago, Essential Skills in the workplace was a hard sell. The prevailing logic went something like this - some workplaces say they have employees with low skills, therefore the low skills must be in your workplace too.
What an evolution. Today, work place Essential Skills is about so much more than basic skills... it’s about working with employers to improve productivity and service.
In large part, it’s about helping workplaces adapt to the changing business environment. Expectations of work are increasing across all sectors and job classifications. In our competitive global environment, employers can’t fumble through and neither can employees fumble through.
Essential Skills are being tightly linked to the tasks in the workplace. Essential Skills are assisting workplaces to strengthen basic human resource functions – hiring, job descriptions, and training, and to improve productivity in operations and customer service.
I'm very interested in hearing your perspective on the value of investing in Essential Skills. To help seed this discussion, Moving Forward will begin featuring Manitoba workplace experiences in Essential Skills.
Stay tuned and feel free to contribute to our discussion.