A no-fault approachto workplace basic-skills assessment
✍ Scribed by Lynda McCalman
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 453 KB
- Volume
- 23
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0745-7790
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
BASIC-SKIL LS ASSESSMENT L y n d a M c C a l m a n
T he Educational Testing Service (ETS) reported in 1992 that 8.7 million individuals of the 20 million surveyed in the United States (43 percent of the surveyed group) were functioning at the lowest levels. A conservative estimate is the 10 to 20 percent of each employer's workforce needs additional basicskills training to maintain success in current jobs. Even more attention to basic-skills improvement is needed to prepare the existing workforce for the demands of future jobs. There is increasing concern about the extent to which basic-skills deficiencies in the workforce may have a negative impact on profits and competitiveness. However, as employers attempt to address the gap between what employees know and what they need to know to improve competitiveness, they must also be attentive to using strategies that raise skills without lowering morale or production. If efforts to identify a corporate basic-skills baseline go wrong, the result may be employee resistance to training. Workplace basicskills assessment programs may offer part of the solution.
Typical workplace basic-skills assessment techniques often tell managers unexpected facts about their workers. For example, recent assessments in several corporations revealed that workers