Eliminate Barriers
Your joint committee is responsible for dealing with barriers that emerge throughout the planning cycle. After a decade of experience, CAMA offers a range of solutions for eliminating barriers that commonly appear in municipal workplaces.
What are the five most common barriers?
The five most common barriers to workplace learning are
1. negative perceptions of the term literacy
2. lack of awareness about the need for workplace education
3. deciding on whose time employees will learn
4. conflicting priorities: work or learning
5. sustainability
1. Negative perceptions of the term literacy
The terms literacy and illiteracy are often paired and can create a negative perception of a person’s abilities. This perception is often tied into fear of failure, fear of job loss, and resistance to enrolling in learning programs.
Solutions
- Use other names to promote the program, such as workplace education, workplace learning, essential skills, workplace skills, or more specific titles that relate to the type of course, such as communication skills.
- Promote lifelong learning for everyone and offer personal, academic, and work-related programs that appeal to different interests and needs across the full spectrum of municipal employees.
- Use the term literacies in situations where an appeal to different types of literacy (computer, graphic, media, or print) would be a convincing message.
- Ensure confidentiality in participation and completion, if necessary. Always ensure confidentiality in individual needs assessments and progress reports.
- Make participation voluntary.
- Use alternative methods rather than formal tests for assessing skills and evaluating progress. Other methods such as performance of tasks, portfolio of completed work, andproject-based activities can reduce the fear of failure and the reluctance to participate.
2. Lack of awareness about the need for workplace education
Managers and supervisors may be unaware of the need for further education in different types of literacy. Or, they may think that employees with a high school diploma or GED should have adequate skills to handle all literacy demands on the job.
Solutions
- Investigate how new technologies, certification, or changes in hiring procedures affect the literacy requirements of jobs and the need for employees to continually upgrade their skills.
- Point out the growing number of new literacies that people are now required to master.
- Encourage managers and supervisors to consider education and training for employees at all levels of the corporation including themselves.
- Promote a broad-based approach to workplace learning that appeals to different interests and needs. This inclusive approach avoids stereotyping the program and the participants, attracts more people, and carries the message of lifelong learning.
3. Deciding on whose time employees will learn
Should it be the corporation’s time, employees’ own time, or, a 50/50 shared time arrangement where the employees contribute one hour and the corporation pays for the second hour? The solution often lies in the learning culture promoted by the corporation and the unions.
Solutions
- Investigate how training programs are currently covered for different levels of the corporation. What training takes place on work time? What training is on the employee’s own time? Some municipalities make distinctions between essential learning for work and learning for personal development or personal interest. For example, essential learning for work is on work time or shared time, and employees get full or partial pay; personal development courses are on the employee’s own time.
- Arrange for make-up sessions when peak work times interfere with scheduled learning hours.
- Bank hours for learning and either have participants take the time off (or partial time off) with pay or receive wages (or partial wages) for the time that they spend learning.
4. Conflicting priorities: work or learning
Managers and supervisors may be concerned that education will interfere with work. Supervisors often insist that an employee stays on the job when emergencies arise, or when they are short-staffed and do not have alternative staffing arrangements.
Solutions
- Acknowledge that courses may be interrupted by emergency situations and that public safety is the first priority. Plan ahead for these situations: offer make-up classes or extend the course to cover missed classes.
- Keep in touch with participants who have difficulties attending because of scheduling, overtime, or unforeseen circumstances. What make-up procedure works for them? Home assignments, alternative scheduling, or short-term tutoring?
- Schedule classes at a variety of times and locations to provide better access for people who are on shift work or who need to make up missed classes.
- Build support among supervisors, especially those who work directly with participants. Enlist their help, keep communication lines open, hear their concerns, and let them know they are key to a successful program.
- Refer to CAMA projects that demonstrate that operations are not negatively affected by participation in learning programs. It is not work or learning, but rather mutual co-existence that comes about with careful planning, flexibility, and creative thinking.
5. Sustainability
Workplace programs usually begin with start-up funding and high enthusiasm. How do municipal corporations sustain this energy and financial support after the initial success?
Solutions
- Search for new sources of funding if the funder is no longer able to contribute. Some municipal programs begin with provincial funding and then the city takes responsibility after a series of successful programming.
- Entrench the workplace learning program in the municipal training plan and budget.
- Request money from the municipal training budget.
- Work with local community organizations (literacy, business associations, health agencies) to find volunteers to offer programs or provide free services.
- Be aware that workplace learning programs have a natural life cycle that suits the needs, interests, and culture of the corporation and its employees. Some programs last for two years and others go on for ten. If workplace essential skills or workplace literacy are integrated into job training, then they will always have a presence.
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| Last Reviewed: Nov. 22, 2006 | Return To Top | Content © 2006 |