National Adult Literacy Database

This paper is part of a series of summaries that explain, in straightforward language, a number of online research documents from Statistics Canada. It is part of a project carried out by the National Adult Literacy Database (NALD), with funding from the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL).

The study summarized here used Canadian data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) to examine the relationships between schooling, literacy, and the assignment of individuals to occupations.

Analysis of the required training time of individuals’ jobs shows that literacy skills are an important determinant of occupational assignment by skill level, once schooling is taken into account. Skills acquired through on-the-job training may also play an important role in occupational assignment.

The Statistics Canada report concludes that literacy skills play a significant role in the assignment of workers to occupations, independent of the role of schooling. This would seem to indicate that employers are capable of determining their employees’ literacy skills by more accurate means than simply depending on their level of schooling as an indicator of workers’ productivity.