Workplace Basic Education (WBE)
What is Workplace Basic Education?
Workplace basic education (WBE) is an innovative measure to improve people’s literacy skills in the workplace, through the provision of workplace basic literacy programmes. The programmes benefit both the employee and the employer.
Why is literacy in the workplace important?
Literacy in the workplace has become an increasingly important issue in the last decade. Ireland has seen many years of continued economic success and the era when we relied heavily on industrial or agricultural industries to drive our economy is now in the past. This means that the number of highly paid job opportunities for the less qualified, has reduced significantly. Today our economy is diversifying and Tomorrow’s Skills – Towards a National Skills Strategy (2007) states that if we are to retain our economic edge into the future we need to focus our attention on education and training. We need to ensure our workers have transferable skills that can be used in a changing economy.
In order to ensure Ireland remains economically competitive the National Skills Strategy reports that 500,000 members of the workforce will have to improve their skills by one National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ) level over a period of 13 years. 70,000 of these individuals have basic educations needs.
The future success of companies and the economy then is dependent on meeting the basic educational needs of these people. Many of the 70,000 individuals are already in the workforce and many of them already struggle to maintain a work life balance. Taking on additional training in their own time may not be possible. They may also be reluctant to admit to having basic educational needs. So by engaging participants in work based education literacy and numeracy can be integrated into work related training, helping to remove the stigma and time barriers, make learning relevant and support work related learning needs.
How will employers benefit?
Employers will directly benefit from the worker’s development. Increased literacy levels has been linked to increased productivity; studies show that a 1% rise in literacy rates was connected with a 2.5% rise in productivity and a 1.5% increase in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Developing basic literacy and numeracy skills may also enable employees to engage in further training.
Despite the fact that workplace basic education is relatively new in Ireland but NALA is involved in a range of projects that support the development of basic education in the workplace. Please contact Helen Ryan at hryan@nala.ie or on 01 850 9119
