Essential Skills - National Adult Literacy Database

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Essential Skills and the Northern Oil and Gas Workforce Final Report and Resource Guide
How can TOWES be used?
For the employer, TOWES provides an objective measure, which relates skill levels to
international standards. With the growing importance of competency and certification issues,
such credible measurement is a necessity. TOWES can also be used:
• to target the essential skills that should be included in training programs (including
starting levels and end points)
• as a pre-test and post-test to determine how much learning has occurred
• to determine the kinds of training programs that have to be introduced when new
technology or processes become part of a workplace
• to help workers move from one position (within a company) to another by targeting
the skills required for advancement
• to help assess worker abilities when the worker does not have Canadian credentials
• to help assess worker ability to perform job requirements (a more inclusive and
reasonable approach to recruitment than simply using a grade level as a qualifier)
• to help workers plan careers and to make realistic re-deployment decisions (a worker’s
TOWES results can be compared to essential skills profiles for a variety of occupations)
• to help develop job descriptions that more closely match the requirements of the
occupation
• to help identify candidates for new positions
• to assist career councillors to provide realistic employment options to clients
TOWES promotes the transference and training of workplace essential skills.
What are the TOWES G-Series Tests?
TOWES G-Series Tests accurately measure essential skill competencies in the areas of
reading text, document use and problem solving with numbers. These competencies can be
compared to the national benchmarks required of individual occupations as determined by
HRSDC via the essential skills occupational profiling process.
The TOWES G Series Tests comprise problem sets from a range of occupational areas. Each
problem set has several related questions, which test literacy/numeracy skills at different
levels of complexity (to match the range of complexity demanded by actual workplace
tasks.) The names of the problem sets often reveal their origins - ‘Grain Drying,’ ‘Marine
Radio,’ ‘Mine Emergency,’ and ‘Shipping Order’ problems. Each problem set is a particular
instance of tasks using essential workplace skills. (See the following example of a TOWES
problem set.) In other words, each TOWES G Series Test is a selection of problem sets taken
from the validated TOWES test bank.
To ensure that the worker has mastered literacy and numeracy skills to the required levels,
TOWES includes tasks and documents from a variety of occupations. These tasks assess the
worker’s ability to apply skills in a number of workplace contexts, a strategy called essential
skills transference.
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