As Brigid Hayes pointed out in Wiping Out the History of Essential Skills, adult literacy resources using the Essential Skills framework may be more difficult to find now. If you don’t already know about them or if you’ve forgotten the title or the publisher, how do you find them?

A sample of adult literacy resources using the Essential Skills framework

• Aboriginal Essential Skills Journey* – a facilitator guide and participant workbook for a workshop designed to present Essential Skills in a way that reflects an Indigenous world view
• Connecting Literacy and Employment Through Essential Skills * – a series of seven workbooks with Essential Skills activities embedded in employment-readiness tasks.
• Embedding Literacy & Essential Skills: lessons from our research* – strategies for developing workplace literacy programs that can be incorporated into a work environment with minimal difficulty
• Essential Skills for Personal Success* – a four module curriculum for using Essential Skills to meet basic needs, manage health, manage personal issues and contacts, and participate in community
• Essential Skills in the Gaming Industry – a series of seven workbooks to help employees in the gaming industry develop their Essential Skills
• Everything Present in the Seed* – a curriculum for community members to discover their leadership skills while developing literacy and Essential Skills
• Paving the Way to Lasting Employment: A Manual and 12 Interactive Training Videos Demonstrating the Importance and Practice of Essential Skills in the Small Business Environment – focus on soft skills needed in retail, customer service and administrative settings
• Recognizing Life’s Work: Helping Learners Connect their Essential Skills from Home to Work: a Practitioner’s Resource Kit* – identifying Essential Skills in personal life and how they might transfer to work
• Spotlight on change: an Essential Skills Upgrading Program for Women over 40* – a program to help participants increase Essential Skills and confidence so they can build employability skills
• Walking a Balanced Path: a guide for developing health and wellness skills* – connects what Indigenous communities know about wellness with models developed in other communities; based on the medicine wheel; designed to improve literacy and Essential Skills while learning more about health and wellness; facilitator and participant guides

Where to find these resources

You can download most of these resources for free. Links are provided above.

Anyone in BC can borrow print copies of the resources marked with an asterisk (*) from the Decoda Literacy Library.

There were many other resources created using the Essential Skills framework. For help locating them, explore the Copian Library (for pre-2015 resources) or contact the Decoda Library.

The new Skills for Success website displays a number of recent training tools including the Workwrite workbook series* and the Up Skills for Work resources. More will be added as resources based on the Skills for Success framework are developed.