Work-Readiness Skills

Introduction

“Success is a ladder you cannot climb with your hands in your pockets.”
– American Proverb

In this era of technology, mastery of Office and computer skills is necessary to employers. Those skills are the ladder. Work-readiness skills, then, allow you to take your hands out of your pockets so you can begin your climb to success. They can also help you prevent falls! Learning how to communicate effectively, to solve problems, to work in a team, to handle and process information, etcetera are as essential in the workplace as in life. Our personal and workplace toolboxes require interpersonal and soft skills as well as technical skills. 

This web page focuses on the workplace skills as adapted from The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), which studied various organizations in a joint project between the U.S. Department of Labor and the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). It is a widely accepted and used list of skills needed to succeed in the modern workplace.

Overview of Work-Readiness Skills

Foundation Skills Basic Skills Reading Writing Using arithmetic/mathematics Listening Speaking Thinking Skills Thinking creatively Making decisions Solving problems Knowing how to learn Reasoning Personal Qualities Showing responsibility Demonstrating self-esteem Improving sociability Managing the self Showing integrity/honesty

Workplace Competencies Resources Allocating time Allocating money Allocating materials and facilities Allocating human resources Interpersonal Participating as a member of a team Teaching others new skills Serving clients/customers Exercising leadership Negotiating to arrive at a decision Working with cultural diversity Information Acquiring and evaluating information Organizing and maintaining information Interpreting and communicating information Using computers to process information Systems Understanding systems Monitoring and correcting performance Improving and designing systems Technology Selecting technology Applying technology to a task Maintaining and troubleshooting technology

Foundation Skills

Merriam-Webster.com defines a foundation as “a basis (as a tenet, principle, or axiom) upon which something stands or is supported.”  For the workplace, basic skills such as reading and mathematics, thinking skills, and personal qualities such as honesty are the foundation employers expect from all employees.
[Back to top]

Basic Skills

The basic skills of reading, writing, mathematics, listening, and speaking are needed to communicate effectively and to be effective in the workplace.

• Reading: Employers need the ability to locate, understand, and interpret all forms of written information, from documents and reports to graphs and schedules. This ability is needed across the board in all jobs and includes understanding specialized vocabulary and the ability to judge both accuracy and plausibility.
• Writing: Employees need to be able to communicate thoughts, ideas, information, and messages in writing. This includes creating documents including letters, manuals, directions, reports, graphs, and flow charts as well as editing and revising using appropriate emphasis, form, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Using arithmetic/mathematics: The workplace requires workers who can perform basic computations and estimating skills as well as who have the ability to choose appropriately from mathematical techniques when approaching practical problems. It is necessary to be able to express mathematical ideas and concepts orally and in writing.
• Listening: It is necessary to receive, attend to, interpret, and respond to verbal messages and other cues such as body language in the workplace. This also includes the skill of critical evaluation of the speaker.
• Speaking: It is necessary to be able to organize ideas and communicate orally, to be heard and understood.  Speaking can be in one-on-one conversations, group discussions, or presentations but must use language and cues appropriate to the audience and situation.
  [Back to top]

Thinking Skills

The modern workplace requires workers who can think creatively, make good decisions, solve problems, and visualize, and who have the ability to learn and reason.

• Thinking creatively: The current workplace requires the ability to use imagination freely and to combine ideas/information in new ways. Generating new ideas can include making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and reshaping goals to reveal new possibilities.
• Making decisions: Employees need to be able to make decisions that specify goals and constraints, generate alternatives, and considers risks. It is also necessary to evaluate and choose the best alternative.
• Solving problems: This begins with the ability to recognize that a problem exists and then to be able to devise and implement a plan of action. It is necessary to be able to evaluate and monitor the progress of the plan – and then to revise it as indicated by findings.
• Knowing how to learn: Learning includes the recognition of and use of learning techniques to apply and adapt new knowledge and skills both in familiar and changing situations. It requires the use of formal and informal teaming skills and formal learning strategies such as note taking and clustering items that share some characteristics.
• Reasoning: Employees need to be able to discover rules or principles underlying relationships between two or more objects and then to apply those rules and principles when solving problems. Reasoning also includes using logic to draw conclusions from available information and applying rules and principles to new situations.
  [Back to top]

Personal Qualities

This foundation skill includes displaying responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, integrity, and honesty.

• Showing responsibility: Employers want workers who exert a high level of effort and perseverance towards attaining goals and who have excellent attendance, punctuality, enthusiasm, and optimism in approaching and completing tasks. Workers who set high standards and strive to become excellent at doing tasks, pay attention to details, display high levels of concentration even when assigned unpleasant tasks are highly prized. 
• Demonstrating self-esteem: Believing in one’s own self-worth, maintaining a positive view of the self, and knowing one’s own emotional capacity and needs and how to address them demonstrates self-esteem. 
• Improving sociability: Showing empathy and politeness in new and ongoing group settings, demonstrating understanding, friendliness, adaptability, and empathy and asserting oneself both in familiar and unfamiliar social situations is important in today’s workplace. Employers expect employees to take an interest in what others say and do and to respond as the situation requires.
• Managing the self: This personality quality includes the ability to assess one’s own knowledge, skills, and abilities accurately to set well-defined, realistic personal goals, and subsequently, to monitor their progress toward goal attainment. This requires self-control, unemotional and non-defensive responses to feedback, and being a “self-starter.”
• Showing integrity/honesty: In the workplace, choosing ethical courses of action and showing you can be trusted is necessary. Workers may be faced with making decisions or exhibiting behavior that may break with commonly held personal or societal values. It is a critical skill to understand the impact of violating these beliefs and codes on an organization, oneself, and others.
  [Back to top]

Workplace Competencies

The SCANS Report lists five competencies that employers require in the workplace. Successful workers need to effectively use resources, interpersonal skills, information, systems, and technology. 

Resources

This workplace competency includes the ability to identify, organize, and allocate resources.

• Allocating time: This resource includes selecting and ranking goal-relevant activities, budgeting, time, and understanding, preparing, and following schedules. Competent performance requires developing and following an effective, workable schedule including accurate estimates of task importance, the time needed to complete them, and deadlines.
• Allocating money: Using and preparing budgets, making forecasts, keeping detailed records tracking budget performance, and the ability to adjust as needed is an important part of this competency. Competent distribution of money also includes accurate preparation and use of budgets that project future needs accurately, and taking appropriate and effective actions when actual costs and revenues differ from the estimated budget.
• Allocating materials and facilities: The acquisition, storage and distribution of materials, supplies, parts, equipment, space, and/or final products must be done carefully in order to make the best use of them. Competent performance in material and facility resource usage includes careful planning of the steps involved, transportation or storing, maintaining them in good condition, and finally, distribution to the end user.
• Allocating human resources: Successful assigning of human resources requires assessing knowledge and skills and distributing workloads accordingly, performance evaluations, and appropriate feedback. Competency includes accurately assessing people’s knowledge, skills, abilities, and potential; identifying present and future workload; and making matches between individual talents and workloads.

[Back to top]

Interpersonal

This competency focuses on working well with others in all roles and positions, from team leadership role to customer service.

• Participating as a member of a team: All team participants need to work cooperatively and contribute ideas, suggestions, and effort to their group. Doing one’s share of necessary tasks and providing encouragement to all team members, building on each others’ strengths, resolving differences, and taking personal responsibility for accomplishing goals as well as assessing performance and providing constructive feedback, is a significant part of successful team participation.
• Teaching others new skills: Demonstrating competency in teaching others includes helping others learn to apply related concepts and theories, identifying training needs, and assisting them through coaching or other means. The teacher needs to be able to assess performance and provide constructive feedback and reinforcement.
• Serving clients/customers: Effectively serving clients/customers requires satisfying their expectations and communicating through active listening to avoid misunderstandings and to identify needs. Also, communicating in a positive manner, especially when handling complaints or conflict, is necessary to satisfy customer/client needs.
• Exercising leadership: Handling a leadership role requires the excellent communication of thoughts, feelings, and ideas to justify a position and the ability to encourage, persuade, convince, or otherwise motivate individuals or groups. It also requires the responsible challenging of existing procedures, policies, or authority; taking minority viewpoints into consideration; making positive use of the rules/values followed by others; logical and appropriate justification of positions; and establishing credibility through competence and integrity.    
• Negotiating to arrive at a decision: The skill of working towards an agreement involving the exchange of resources or resolution of divergent interests involves researching opposition and history of the conflict, setting realistic and attainable goals, and presenting facts and arguments. Listening to and reflecting on what has been said, clarifying problems and resolving conflicts, adjusting quickly to new facts/ideas, and proposing and examining options while making reasonable compromises is necessary to successful negotiation.
• Working with cultural diversity: In a workforce that has become increasingly global, it is necessary to work well with people from a variety of ethnic, social, and/or educational backgrounds. It is also necessary to understand one’s own culture and the culture and concerns of members of other ethnic and gender groups and how they differ. This includes respecting the rights of others while helping them make cultural adjustments where necessary and basing impressions on individual performance, not on stereotypes. 
  [Back to top]

Information

The acquisition and use of information is a necessary competency in all work environments.

• Acquiring and evaluating information: Demonstrating competency in this skill includes identifying the need for data, obtaining it from existing sources or creating new sources, and evaluating relevance and accuracy. This includes positing analytic questions to determine specific information needs, selecting possible information, evaluating its appropriateness, and determining when new information must be created.
• Organizing and maintaining information: Organizing, processing, and maintaining written or computerized forms of information in a systematic fashion requires understanding and organizing information in readily accessible formats such as databases, spreadsheets, paper files etc. When necessary, it can include transforming data into different formats to organize them by the application of sorting, classifying, or more formal methods.
• Interpreting and communicating information: Selection and analysis of information and communication of the results to others using oral, written, graphic, pictorial, or multimedia methods is needed for competent performance of the tasks of communicating and interpreting information to others. 
• Using computers to process information: Using computers to acquire, organize, analyze, and communicate information requires the competent use of computers to process the information and good choice of display format (e.g., line graphics, bar graphs, pie charts, narrative, etc.). The information converted to the chosen format must be accurate and provide appropriate information.
  [Back to top]

Systems

 This competency requires understanding complex interrelationships, monitoring and correcting performance, and the improvement and designing of systems.

• Understanding systems: Knowing how social, organizational, and technological systems work, the ability to operate effectively within them, and knowing how a system’s structures relate to goals is necessary in demonstrating this competency. This also includes responding to the demands of the system/organization, from knowing the right people to ask for information or resources to being able to function within both the formal and informal codes of the system.
• Monitoring and correcting performance: Understanding how to distinguish trends and predict the impact of actions on system operations as well as the ability to diagnose deviations in the function of a system/organization and take necessary corrective actions is vital to competency in this area. 
• Improving and designing systems: It is necessary to be able to suggest modifications to existing systems and to develop new or alternative systems in order to improve overall system performance. This would be based on relevant feedback as well as data to provide the greatest benefits.
  [Back to top]

Technology

Technology competence requires the ability to work with a variety of existing, new, and emerging technologies.

• Selecting technology: Competency in this area requires judging which set of procedures, tools, or machines will produce the desired results. This includes visualizing the necessary methods and applicable technology (whether computer, software, etc.) and evaluating specifications in order to produce the best results.
• Applying technology to task: Understanding the overall intent and the proper procedures for setting up and operating machines (including computers and their programming systems), and demonstrating how to apply technology to tasks, includes understanding how differing technologies interact and how to set up the systems to get your desired results.
• Maintaining and troubleshooting technology: It is necessary to be able to prevent, identify, and/or solve problems in machines, computers, and other technologies. To troubleshoot effectively, machines must have regular preventative maintenance, and service and workable solutions are needed to correct deviations and decisions, made when additional help is needed.
  [Back to top]