ESPORT^TM is based on HRSDC's Essential Skills and Essential Skills Profiles.

What are Essential Skills ?

These are teachable, transferable and measurable skills most closely linked to labour market success.

They are the skills people need in order to lead productive economic lives. The skills that HRSDC now calls Essential Skills started to take shape in Canada during the early 1990s. At that time adult educators across Canada and around the world were trying to identify the education outcomes that would lead their countries to economic success. The Essential Skills Research Project identified and defined these skills:

They are the generic skills people need for work, learning and life and which provide the foundation for occupation-specific skills. Carol MacLeod, one of the principal researchers on the Essential Skills Project told us, "The turning point for Essential Skills was when HRDC decided we needed to develop a methodology where the exclusive focus was to take a look at the foundation skills that support a job incumbent's ability to learn new tasks and to perform on the job."

more at: http://srv600.hrdcdrhc.gc.ca/esrp/english/general/Understanding_ES_e.shtml

So the Project sent researchers into the workplace to document how each of these skills was used in each of hundreds of occupations. The Essential Skills are generic but they take various forms in different occupations. (The writing done by a nurse's aide is different from that done by an insurance investigator.) The results of this research can be seen in the Essential Skills Profiles .

What are Essential Skills Profiles?

What the Project did next was to move this research into the realm of the practical. This is where tools like TOWES (the Test of Workplace Essential Skills) and ESPORT^TM (Essential Skills Portfolio) fit in. TOWES provides reliable external assessment; ESPORT^TM enables reflection, self-assessment, documentation, and remediation. In addition, colleges are developing Essential Skills career-preparation programs and sector organizations such as trucking, tourism, and the automotive industry are taking on the task of analyzing important sub-categories of profiled occupations.

more at: http://srv600.hrdcdrhc.gc.ca/esrp/english/general/ES_Profiles_e.shtml

Beginning in 1996 and 1997, excitement over Essential Skills began to build among educators and career guidance professionals. The Essential Skills, themselves, were close to the taxonomy people had been looking for (clearly employment related, but covering social objectives as far as they were related to employment).

The Profiles were the application of the taxonomy, allowing Users to see immediately what enabling skills a tax clerk or landscape gardener needed if a company was to take them on for training.

However, the material was massive. Adult educators would go into it, pull material out of it, and find uses for it in their programs. But what would the implications be if this entire body of research were made available to individual learners in ways that could be coordinated or facilitated in programs across the country? That is what ESPORT^TM set out to do.

Although ESPORT^TM continues to evolve, as do Essential Skills, we now feel we are working with something powerful and flexible enough to make the Essential Skills a cornerstone of employment-related education across the country.

Funding for this project is provided by the Government of Canada through Human Investment Programs, HRSDC.