Understanding Essential Skills

Essential Skills are the skills needed for work, learning and life. They provide the foundation for learning all other skills and enable people to evolve with their jobs and adapt to workplace change.

Through extensive research, the Government of Canada and other national and international agencies have identified and validated nine Essential Skills. These skills are used in nearly every occupation and throughout daily life in different ways and at different levels of complexity.

There are nine Essential Skills:

• Reading Text
• Document Use
• Numeracy
• Writing
• Oral Communication
• Working with Others
• Continuous Learning
• Thinking Skills
• Computer Use

To learn more about the complexity levels of Essential Skills, visit the Essential Skills Online Learning Tool.

To learn more about Essential Skills and how they relate to Canadian occupations visit the Essential Skills Equalizer. The Equalizer is an interactive learning tool that provides users with definitions, example tasks and skill sets for sample occupations.

For more information on Essential Skills, follow the links below:

• Essential Skills Research Project
• Reader's Guide
• 10 Myths we shouldn't believe about Essential Skills