1. INTRODUCTION

This paper focuses on adults in employment who have low literacy or numeracy skills. It provides information on their personal and job characteristics, the industries and occupations they work in and their education and training rates and patterns. The paper analyses information that was collected in the Adult Learning and Life Skills (ALL) Survey. ALL measured the English-language literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of a representative sample of New Zealand residents during the 2005-07 period.

The information in this paper can be used to help identify the industries and occupations that have greatest literacy and numeracy training needs and to better understand the characteristics and current learning patterns of workers whose foundation skills are low.

The study differs from previous studies of adults with low literacy and numeracy skills in that it focuses solely on adults who were employed (unlike Sutton, 2009), and it provides information for industry and occupational groups that are defined at a more detailed level than previous analyses. Results are given for 18 occupational groups and 18 industry groups - groups that correspond roughly to the two-digit levels of the official occupation and industry classifications. The study also examines the further education and training patterns of workers aged 25 and over whose literacy or numeracy skills are relatively weak.

The paper has four main sections. The first describes the data used in this paper, including the way in which literacy and numeracy were measured in ALL. The second section examines the characteristics of workers with low literacy and numeracy skills. The third section describes the prevalence of low foundation skills in different industries and occupations. The fourth section explores the formal education and training that is undertaken by workers with low foundation skills, focusing particularly on those aged 25 and over. It explores the factors associated with a higher likelihood for this group of undertaking further education and training.

There are social and economic reasons for identifying the numbers and employment patterns of adults who have low levels of literacy and numeracy. Adults with very low levels of these skills have poorer outcomes than other adults in many domains of life, such as educational participation and achievement, family relationships and incomes (Parsons and Bynner, 2008). In the context of work, previous analyses of the New Zealand ALL survey data have shown that adults with low literacy or numeracy tend to have low earnings (Earle, 2009). Low levels of foundation skills have been identified as one of the factors contributing to low labour productivity (Workplace Productivity Working Group, 2004).