Essential Skills - National Adult Literacy Database

Essential Skills and the Northern Oil and Gas Workforce Final Report and Resource Guide
Day 3 SESSION 3:
Integrated document use
Presenter: Pat Salt (Bow Valley College)
Document Use refers to tasks that involve a variety of information displays in which words,
numbers, icons and other visual characteristics (eg., line, colour, shape) are given meaning
by their spatial arrangement. Graphs, lists, tables, blueprints, schematics, drawings, signs
and labels are documents used in the world of work.
Document Use includes:
• print and non-print media (for example, computer screen or microfiche documents,
equipment gauges, clocks and flags)
• reading / interpreting and writing / completing / producing of documents – these two
uses of documents often occur simultaneously as part of the same task, e.g.,
completing a form, checking off items on a list of tasks, plotting information on a
graph, and entering information on an activity schedule. 1
Every occupation profiled by the Government of Canada in the Essential Skills Research
Project was found to require some use of documents.
Pat took participants through a document use exercise involving flowcharts. The point of the
exercise was to demonstrate that:
• Document use skills can be taught
• With only a few minutes of training, workers are able to navigate documents much
more efficiently
• Some documents are not designed well and some basic principles help to improve
document usability
• Practice improves document use efficiency
1 (information retrieved June 25, 2005 from:
http://www15.hrdc-drhc.gc.ca/english/general/Readers_guide.asp?section_number=14)
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