Literacy Skills

One of the many Employability Skills, which includes Reading and Writing, and Speaking and Listening. It seems obvious, but there is a need to be able to read and write to a reasonable standard within a business environment. This doesn’t mean that you can say you have authored a book, but you need to be able to understand the meaning of sentences and to be able to construct your own well-structured sentences. Spelling, punctuation and grammar are important areas, but that doesn’t mean to say you need to know all the words in a dictionary or to have in depth grammatical knowledge. Employers are looking for a general level of literacy skills as this is essential if you are to be able to communicate effectively with others, irrespective of the type of communication.

Being able to compose an email, letter, a note from a telephone call you have taken, log an instance of a customer’s query or complaint, writing a short report, taking minutes of meetings, preparing a short article for the company web site or material for marketing and publicity all requires a general level of literacy. It doesn’t take long to quickly find a typo or spelling error or see where a word has been used totally out of context, this can result in bad publicity for a company.

If you did not perform well at school, then there are plenty of ways to help you to gain a suitable level of literacy. One obvious way is to take a course, however, if this isn’t a suitable option then there are other ways which can significantly improve your literacy skills.

The internet provides a means to read lots of newspapers and other written material; you can find out how to pronounce many words using computerised readers,Google’s Translate is a really good piece of software; all you need to do is make sure you select English as both the translate from and translate to language. It is also quite good at reading back sentences you might have copied and pasted into the input box. It’s really easy so give it a try if you have done so already.

TheChambers Dictionaries provide an excellent resource to help in improve your writing skills and cover punctuation, spelling, grammar, practical writing, improve your English and abbreviations.

TheBBC's Skillswise site also provides comprehensive resources for reading, writing, spelling, speaking and listening, word grammar and sentence grammar.

The web site for theSkills Workshop provides lots of examples that you can practice developing your literacy skills.