Strengthening the workforce: literacy tied to successful apprenticeships: report.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: SMALL BUSINESS

Ontario is experiencing a need for skilled trades workers, but a lack of literacy skills can be a barrier to people completing their apprenticeships and passing their qualification exams. A recent report examines the links between apprenticeships and literacy and offers best practices to help bridge that gap.

Supporting Apprenticeship Completions: a Model of Service Provision was commissioned by Workforce Planning for Sudbury & Manitoulin, the Mid-North Network and the Labour Market Group (Nipissing and Parry Sound).

A lack of literacy skills, including communications, studying skills, test anxiety and speaking a language other than English, all contribute to difficulties apprentices face when trying to pass their qualifying exam, the report indicates.

One of the key findings, says project coordinator Stewart Kallio, is that there's a need for literacy skills providers to collaborate on ensuring apprentices receive the guidance they need to improve their skills.

"There's a real opportunity for the literacy and basic skills service providers to play a role in helping apprentices prepare and be successful.," Kallio said. "To this point, they haven't had a strong role to play in working with apprentices and the trades."

Apprentices often don't know where to turn for help, and so they get frustrated and give up, Kallio said.

But if service providers can actively work to recruit apprentices and help them update and improve their skills, they could enhance their rate of success substantially.

"We actually demonstrated some best practices for going out to recruit apprentices, some strong approaches to doing really good assessment to see what the exact problem is, and then some effective training that focused on getting them the kind of help they need," Kallio said. "Every apprentice who's trying to complete is different."

Service providers also need to put more emphasis on using an essential skills framework to assess the readiness of apprentices to perform work competently.

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To get the experience they need, apprentices have to find an employer willing to take them on, but it's harder for small businesses to get on board because of the cost and time commitment involved. Often, after they've trained an apprentice, that person will leave for another, higher paying job.

In some cases, even if they have all their hours, employers still might not hire them because they haven't completed Grade 12. The average age of a person going...