About Skills Highway
About Skills Highway
Skills Highway is a workplace literacy and numeracy initiative that provides funding and resources to support employees’ literacy, numeracy and communication skills. It helps build a competitive, skilled and productive workforce.
Skills Highway is a workplace literacy and numeracy initiative that provides funding and resources to support employees’ literacy, numeracy and communication skills. It helps build a competitive, skilled and productive workforce.
Skills Highway is funded by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC).
Skills Highway initiatives include:
- developing and promoting good practice strategies for introducing and maintaining literacy and numeracy programmes in the workplace
- promoting the Workplace Literacy and Numeracy Fund to employers.
Why are literacy and numeracy important?
Improving literacy and numeracy can:
- unlock productivity
- kick-start educational success, and
- deliver far-reaching benefits for workplaces, and for workers and their families.
Literacy and numeracy skills are crucial for building a competitive, skilled and productive workforce.
Internationally benchmarked research (OECD, 2014) shows that more than a million New Zealand adults have less than optimal literacy skills (43 percent) and numeracy skills (51 percent) for a knowledge-based economy. New Zealand’s low levels of literacy and numeracy contribute to our relatively low productivity.
Improving literacy and numeracy is an action in the Tertiary Education Strategy 2020. Skills Highway is just one part of the Government’s effort to improve New Zealand’s adult literacy and numeracy rates. It aims to help your organisation build a productive, literate and numerate workforce.