The Banking Services and Hotel Services cases to be subsequently described here (Cases 3 and 4) were conducted by the same provider, which we will call the Workplace Education Center (WEC) (not its actual name). WEC, a private not-for-profit agency, is a relative newcomer to the scene, becoming involved in the delivery of workplace literacy services to private sector manufacturing and service firms in 1988, at the height of the debate on the need for increased literacy in the workplace. Because many businesses (mainly because of their small size) do not have the capacity to provide for the educational needs of their employees, WEC has thereby found a niche. Its mission is to assist such businesses in planning and providing workplace basic skills programs. Services that it offers include (1) readability analysis of workplace materials; (2) basic skills/job-task analysis; (3) workforce assessment; (4) customized curriculum development; and (5) customized courses including ESL for work communication, reading and writing for the workplace, and math for statistical process control.
WEC's director reported that as a result of four major trends in the workplace, employers now request job context-based literacy instruction. These trends were (1) international quality standards for products and services, (2) increased concern for customer satisfaction, (3) workplace organization and reorganization, and (4) new workplace technology. She explained further that, in the past, management tended toward a philosophy of "compartmentalization," but now they were partial toward "cross-functional" organization. To succeed, this change would depend upon worker training. There was also the question of technology's impact on work. The director listed some of the new developments to which WEC has had to respond as follows:
There has been introduction of new technology such as CNC [Note: Computer Numerical Control] [and] calculators--you will be surprised that some of the older workers are not comfortable using a calculator. They went to school before calculators were widely used and never got to learn how to use one in school. Computers are being used more and more. Our new training has been in SPC [Note: Statistical Process Control], customer services, work processes, and teamwork in manufacturing firms. Many firms are preparing for ISO 9000 certification, which emphasizes quality and requires workers to use Statistical Process Control techniques. Workers also have to deal more and more with written instruction, especially [of] machine procedures. Customer satisfaction has become more important.
A training manager in one of the manufacturing firms served by WEC explained the following difficulties associated with introducing new techniques:
We are preparing for ISO certification, as you can see. (He showed the ISO promotion badge on his shirt pocket.) One of the things we intend to implement is SPC. When we began training, our machine operators on SPC we found that they did not have sufficient mathematical skills to handle it. We were forced to provide some basic math training in areas like decimals, division, mathematical means, and graphing before the employees could undertake an introductory course in SPC. This is where the WEC came in.
WEC's goal is to deliver quality literacy instruction. However, like other providers, the staff judiciously avoids the use of the term literacy in conversation with employers and employees. As Jones, Locsin, Lynch, Mrowicki, and Olivi (1993) explained,
The term literacy can bring to mind someone who is totally unable to read or write, whereas the participants in a workplace education program may possess sufficient skills to carry on daily tasks, including reading of local newspapers, but lack the special literacy skills for a changing workplace such as reading complex line graphs and lengthy procedural manuals. In such a workplace the term literacy may insult many of the actual workers who the program will be attempting to recruit for participation. (p. 6)
An entrepreneurial perspective was apparent among the staff who characterize themselves as players in the competitive field of training. Their survival depends on their ability to recruit and satisfy the educational needs of clients and write successful proposals that get state and federal funds to support WEC. Although, in the past, this goal was sufficient to motivate WEC to strive for the highest quality of service possible, a new factor has recently been added. WEC is having to compete with multinational firms for funds and sites to provide workplace literacy programs, especially at sites where the employers want to reorganize the workplace and implement Total Quality Management (TQM) methods. The training enterprise is business-like enough to have its own trade secrets, indicated by reluctance on the part of the director to reveal the contents of funding proposals or final reports to grant agencies. A great deal of effort is devoted to producing a good funding proposal, a task in which WEC's director is specialized. How to promote their operation has become a new preoccupation for the director.
Researcher: How do you promote yourselves? How do companies know about your services?
Director: Actually, that is one of the problems we have. We do not advertise our services. We depend on our reputation and contacts in this city. This is an area in which we need ideas.
Despite this lament, the company has a large number of client firms. It has established itself as a provider of choice.
WEC's policy is to seek input in program planning from all of the stakeholders. Although plans are developed cooperatively with active involvement of the training provider, representatives of the employer, and employees or their union, the actual process varies from program to program. After the plans are developed and agreed upon, WEC submits a proposal to the employer for the services that it will provide, including job-task analysis, testing and other literacy assessments, and curriculum development and instruction, and then enters into a contract to implement the plan. The contributions of the participants in the program process follow.
The coordinator, who is employed by WEC, participates and acts on behalf of WEC throughout the planning stage of the initiative. He or she meets with the employer, employees, and, where appropriate, union representatives to collect preliminary data required for proposal writing. When the proposal to conduct the literacy initiative is accepted or approved, the coordinator assesses the employees' basic skills (also called a literacy audit) and analyzes job-tasks (which sometimes involves job shadowing). The coordinator then develops the curriculum and submits it to the employer for approval before scheduling instruction. The coordinator often doubles as instructor, as one WEC staff member pointed out:
I am the coordinator of this program. I am also the instructor. Sometimes we hire part-time instructors for a specific program. In some programs, the instructor and coordinator may be two different Center staff. I prefer that the instructors be present during the literacy audit so that they may observe the real context and be better able to understand the employees' needs.
At the completion of instruction, the instructor assesses the employees' learning and reaction to the program and later interviews supervisors to assess transfer of learning to the job. WEC uses a team approach. Each member of the permanent staff is capable of assuming any of the aforementioned roles in any of the general training categories, including ESL training. For this reason, staff may interchange roles from project to project, or they may operate in tandem at different stages in a given program. WEC director is involved at critical stages in the planning, especially in proposal writing, final stages of the literacy audit, and employees' skills assessment. WEC assigns a coordinator to each initiative to consult with the employer on a regular basis in order to assure the plan was followed. Some of the senior WEC staff serve as instructors at one site and coordinators at another. This role reversal is intended to enable each staff member to view planning and instruction from more than one perspective and, therefore, heighten the level of sensitivity to the concerns of instructors and employers. The coordinator was the person the employer/client contacted whenever a problem surfaced during a program.
The employer identifies a literacy problem and sets out to resolve it by
contacting WEC. The employer then facilitates the literacy audit by scheduling
interviews between supervisors, training staffers (where there is a training
department), and WEC staff. Employee testing and counseling sessions are also
scheduled by the employer. The curriculum is approved by the employer; finally
(and oddly, in our view), impact assessment after the end of the program is
largely the employer's responsibility.
Emphasis is on forming a partnership between the business and the educational
provider. Employee unions play a major part in planning workforce literacy
programs that are conducted by WEC. Table 5 depicts the complementary nature
of the roles assumed by WEC, the education provider, and the business for which
it conducts workplace literacy programs.
Table 5
Partners' Roles--Notes on a Private Provider
| Business | Educational Provider |
|---|---|
| Identifies the contact person. | Facilitates the committee meetings. |
| Forms a basic skills committee. | Provides input on policy decisions. |
| Makes policy decisions regarding the purpose and scope of the audit. | Provides input on the company awareness campaign. |
| Plans a company awareness campaign. | Participates in the company awareness campaign. |
| Identifies appropriate managers, supervisors, line staff, and workers to participate in the audit process; schedules interviews. | Interviews key people. |
| Assembles written materials. | Analyzes the written materials. |
| Arranges for job observations. | Conducts a job literacy task analysis. |
| Reviews the findings. | Prepares a report from the findings. |
Source: Jones et al. (1993), p. 10.
While each employer assumed these roles, some employers showed greater levels of involvement and interest in their literacy programs than others. For example, some employers preferred to let the training provider handle the details, while others delegated managers to sit in during classes to find out what was taught and how it was taught. Even when employers supported the program, some instructors indicated that supervisors were not always supportive, as the following dialogue indicates:
Researcher: We have heard that at other sites some supervisors are somewhat unsupportive of workplace basic skills programs. What was your experience here?
Instructor: I had quite a problem in the beginning. They were very suspicious. People didn't want to give me the information I needed, but I went ahead and started. After a while they realized that we were here to train, and we did not have a hidden motive. When they realized this, they became very cooperative and gave me everything I wanted: documents, blueprints, forms, memos.
Employers were motivated to provide literacy programs for different reasons. Some employers sought training programs intermittently to deal with an immediate problem. Others had a long-term view and implemented training in anticipation of future changes in the firm such as the introduction of SPC techniques.
The input of employees is typically encouraged after instruction begins. Employees may make their needs known to the trainer. They may verbalize very precisely those job-tasks that they felt inadequate to perform and aspects of literacy in which they felt the need to become more competent.
Where a firm is unionized, union support is sought for training programs. In one such case we observed, the union representative simply gave approval but provided little input into the planning of curriculum. WEC staff reported that this situation was not unusual. The following excerpt from an interview with a WEC staff member, who was the instructor at one site, provided further detail:
Researcher: Are the unions involved in planning programs?
WEC staff member: It depends on the site. There are strong unions in some companies but not in others.
Researcher: Was the union involved here?
WEC staff member: Yes, to some extent. We informed them about it and asked for their approval. Their part was quite limited. Sometimes there are no unions at all, or there could be one that is weak. In this plant there was some resistance from employees. They are quite comfortable here with very good pay and benefits. Many of them have been here for fifteen years or more. When they were told about the proposed program their reaction was: "We are fine. Why do we need to learn new things?"
WEC depends primarily on state and federal contracts. State funding through
the Secretary of State Workplace Literacy Grant Program is subject to
regulation regarding the level and type of skills that may be taught and the
length of the program (Ryan, 1993). Technical skills are excluded (a
stringency which makes WEC credible, but which, as was discussed in Case 1,
frustrates vocational education providers), and programs are restricted to
"adult employees who read, write, comprehend, and/or compute below the tenth
grade level" (p. 1). This grade level limitation is not very clear-cut. In
some WEC programs, content is difficult to place using this grade school
criteria. An example is the area of problem solving which was included in some
programs.
Funding is usually available for twelve months with no automatic renewal. The
allocation of these funds is done on a competitive basis by a Literacy Advisory
Board appointed by the Secretary of State in accordance with relevant state
law. This state program is one of WEC's main sources of funding. Each grant
has an upper limit of $10,000, and the training provider must provide a written
agreement in which the recipient firm agrees to provide matching resources.
Matching is usually done by providing space and paying employees for the time
they spend in class (paid release time). Grant writing is obviously considered
pivotal because of the competitive nature of grant funding. As indicated
previously, this task fell almost solely to the director.
Services offered by WEC have been alluded to earlier. WEC subscribes to the functional context approach to curriculum and to competency-based instruction. WEC staff make a distinction between competencies and skills (generic skills), as the director's response with respect to the SCANS report (1991) illustrates:
We ... refer to the SCANS report but we use it as a guide. We do not use their recommendations directly because the SCANS report deals with (generic) skills while we are competency oriented. Competencies are directly related to job-tasks.
WEC views generic skills as being transferable to a range of situations while competencies refer to demonstrated ability to perform a task successfully in a workplace context. Competencies could be subdivided into specific skills. This focus on competencies rather than generic skills seemed at odds with the company's basic argument for its existence, which is that workplaces are in flux.
The curriculum development process starts with a list of competencies, which is then used as a basis for generating a list of specific skills. A WEC instructor explained the process as follows:
After the interviews and my observation of the actual job-tasks, I came up with a list of competencies. What we do is look at each competency and decide what skills are needed in order to carry out the task involved in the competency. For example, we might decide that some basic math is needed in order to perform a certain computation on the job.
This process can be quite elaborate. The curriculum objectives address both
the learners' and the company's needs. According to one WEC manual (Jones et
al., 1993, p. 29), the goal of the curriculum is to describe what is to be
taught and is achieved using the following four steps: (1) identify
competencies, (2) write a course syllabus, (3) develop a customized
pre-/posttest, and (4) develop instructional materials. It is worthwhile to
describe in detail how the typical WEC syllabus is structured. It includes the
following:
Basic Skills Competency: Under this heading is a list of competencies
approved by the basic skills committee.
Core Basic Skills: This section identifies which specific skills are
used to perform a competency. It is the center of curriculum development and
lesson planning.
Company Specific Terminology: This component of the syllabus lists
company materials that support each competency. Examples of these materials
are (1) company policies and procedures, (2) forms employees read and fill out
to do their jobs, (3) safety signs and labels, and (4) names of
products.
Pre-/Posttests: Customized tests that evaluate employees' performance
of the competencies are used. The competency-based approach consists of pre-
and posttesting--that is, using the same test for placement of employees and
evaluation of achievement of the competencies. Testing for achievement of
competencies is done after each competency is learned and at the end of the
cycle.
Instructional Material: These are customized worksheets and
instructional paraphernalia developed by instructors to teach the competency.
The instructor selects company materials that are appropriate to the level of
the course to be delivered. Depending on the course and the level of the
participants, worksheets can be used to practice, review, reinforce, and enrich
the competency. Instructional paraphernalia include posters, collages, or
journals.
WEC programs typically extend over a period of thirty-six contact hours.
WEC attempts to provide support services to workers. A primary support service it offers is making referrals to community ABE providers where workers can learn needed skills not covered in the workplace education program. Examples of these skills are basic reading, writing, and mathematics. Information regarding available community services is provided to the employees during counseling after initial skills assessment. Many employees needed encouragement to overcome their reluctance to make the initial visit to neighborhood adult education classes.
WEC's staff consists of eight people, all of whom have college degrees. Some are multilingual; others were former public school teachers. Two had served as Peace Corps volunteers--one in South America and the other in Africa. This experience seemed to have had a large impact on their views regarding assisting the disadvantaged. Staff members are encouraged to attend professional conferences such as those of the American Society for Training and Development, in order to expand their perspectives and deepen their knowledge of the field.
Having outlined the philosophy and operations of WEC, we next illustrate two cases involving this provider. These cases are a basic skills program at a branch of a large bank and an ESL program at a major hotel. Of interest here is that WEC presents a new configuration of a vocational institution, its model being that of a flexible, itinerant private vendor, specializing in workplace literacy. Within the realm of human resource development, vendors of this order typically offer managerial, sales, and supervisory training. As such, they tend not to be in competition with vocational institutions, whose customized services tend to be of a technical nature. But in the realm of workplace literacy, an entity such as WEC is in direct competition with vocational institutions, their operations being made valid by the fact that state and federal authorities unwittingly mandate the separating out of literacy and technical skills. This challenge forces the latter to focus its claims. What does a vocational institution bring to workplace literacy programming that an entity such as WEC cannot? Are vocational institutions better equipped to offer such programming?