National Adult Literacy Database

The author of this document provides a plain-language summary of a Statistics Canada report that used data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) to compare employee training in Canada, the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, and Sweden.

Measured in terms of hours of training per employee, Canada’s training effort was in the middle of the pack for the IALS countries. The average employee in Canada received 44 hours of training in 1994, similar to the hours of training per employee in Switzerland, the United States and Germany. However, Canada’s training effort was considerably less than that of the Netherlands, for example, which recorded 74 hours per employee.

The Statistics Canada report concluded that Canada has strengths in the area of education and training on which to build an even stronger competitive advantage. A high percentage of employees expressed the desire for more career or job-related training, suggesting that Canada is fertile ground for further emphasis on training.

This document is part of a National Adult Literacy Database (NALD) project, funded by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), aimed at providing a way of quickly assessing the relevancy of a number of online research documents from Statistics Canada.