Understanding Employability Skills

This report provides information that employers, educators and others can use to make strategic decisions about developing employability skills in their employees, in their students and in themselves.

Document Highlights

The skills that employers are looking for range from generic employability and life skills to technical, technological and job-specific skills. Among these skill sets, employability skills are crucial. Employability skills are the generic skills, attitudes and behaviours that employers look for when they hire new recruits and that they seek to develop in their current employees.

This report:

• contains a practical recipe for action: step-by-step tools that can be used as guidelines for developing employability skills.
• introduces a new way of thinking about skills that builds on a long philosophical and historical tradition.
• calls on employers, educators and trainers who prepare Canadians for entering or re-entering the workforce to consider working together to develop (1) methods and instruments to assess how individuals use common sense and practical judgement to select and apply their employability skills; and (2) the capacity of individuals to transfer and apply their skills from context to context.