I am an Adult Literacy Instructor

• How can I use the profiles?
• How can I use the Reader's Guide?
• How can I use the Authentic Workplace materials?

You can use this part of the web site to find:

• Ways to tailor curricula to your learners' varied occupations or occupational interests
• Real work examples to integrate into your program
• Help for your learners in setting their skill development targets

Using the Profiles in curriculum development

Tailoring curriculum to your learners' varied occupations or occupational interests will be easier and more efficient if you start with the relevant Occupational Profiles. The Profiles provide information on how the Essential Skills are used in that occupation. The illustrative examples given for each skill may give you ideas for classroom learning activities that would be particularly relevant to your learners. They can also suggest some of the workplace authentic materials (forms, manuals, etc.) that you may want to obtain for use in classroom activities.

To find information on particular occupations

• Search the profiles using "Occupation". You can search using a job title or a code from the National Occupational Classification.
• You can connect to other sources of information about the occupation using the Links to Other Sites at the end of each profile.

(NOTE: Not all occupations are on the database. What occupations are profiled?)

Using the Profiles to find real work examples to integrate into your program

• Search by "Skills" to find occupations that use skills in a particular way. For example, occupations that involve complex decision making, or resolving conflicts, or reading assembly diagrams. Show me how to do these searches.
  • To get more ideas for classroom activities, visit the Applications of Working and Learning web site.

Using the profiles to get help for your learners in setting their skill development targets

• Learners may have many goals in seeking to enhance their skills, only some of which relate to work. However, they should be encouraged to set their skill acquisition targets so that they are at least appropriate to the skill requirements of their job, or the jobs they.shtmlire to.
• This part of the site can provide help to learners in thinking about their current skill levels and in comparing these to the skill requirements of particular jobs.
• This will involve using the complexity scales. Say your learners are thinking about their problem solving skills.
  • Enter any profile
  • Go to the Problem Solving section
  • Click on "Complexity"

This accesses information about the complexity scale for Problem Solving. Start by looking at the examples that illustrate the levels of the scale. Have they done anything that looks like the examples for Level 1? Level 2? or higher? You may want to look at the formal definitions of the scale.

Do you want to see more examples of the Levels?

• Use Search by skills
• Click the box for Problem Solving. Then click Next.
• Click the box for the complexity level(s) you want to see. Then click Next.
• This gives you a list of all occupational profiles in the database that contain examples illustrating Problem Solving at the level of complexity you chose.
• You can see all these examples by clicking "View Examples" at the bottom of the screen.

Now that they have thought about their skills, they can compare them to the skills required in the occupations that interest them.

• By comparing their skills to the skills used in these occupations, you can help them set their skill development targets. Where do they need to strengthen their skills?

For more help in thinking about their skills, your learners can visit the ESPORT - Essential Skills Portfolio.

Ideas for Using the Readers' Guide to Essential Skills Profiles

Use this to understand the terms used in the Essential Skills profiles and the measurement scales used to describe the complexity of tasks.

You may find the complexity scales useful

• As a tool to guide learners who are self-assessing their skills. (If this interests you, see also the Ideas for Using the Occupational Profiles and the ESPORT - Essential Skills Portfolio.)
• in developing classroom activities in "soft skills" at progressively more complex levels. (You may find it useful to consider the components identified for concepts such as Problem Solving and seeing how these components each range from simple to complex. This may help to identify stepping stones in the skill development process.)
  View the Reader's Guide.

Ideas for Using the Authentic Workplace Materials

The sample workplace materials made available here can be reproduced for use in learning activities in your classroom. (The copyright permissions allowing such use have been obtained.)

The write-up accompanying each sample provides some ideas for how you might use it or how you might use documents like it. This could give you some ideas for how to use other documents in the classroom that are more relevant to your particular learners

You might use samples from particular occupations to give learners a look at some of the activities and skill requirements in the kinds of jobs they are interested in.

View the User Guide to Authentic Workplace Materials.