Elle DuBois
Room 207
Phone: (949)582-4990

Office Hours:
Monday - Friday
9am to 5pm
Closed Weekends

In May 1990, the U.S. Department of Labor created the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) to examine the demands of the new American workplace and to assess whether American youth were capable of meeting those demands. SCANS research identified a three-part foundation of skills and personal qualities and five competency areas that would be required for the workplace beyond 2000.

The competencies do not represent technical skills or subject matter knowledge, such as engineering, accounting, computer programming, and so on. Instead the five competencies represent skills that are generic and needed across all industries and occupations. Students must remember when in the workplace they are not just students but employees and must present a professional face.

The following are core skills and personal qualities needed to perform effectively in the American workplace:

Foundation Skills and Personal Qualities

Basic Skills:

• Reading - can locate, understand and interpret written information in prose and in documents such as manuals, graphs and schedules
• Writing - can communicate thoughts, ideas, information and messages in writing; and can create documents such as letters, directions, manuals, reports, graphs and flow charts
• Arithmetic-Mathematics - can perform basic computations and can approach practical problems by choosing appropriately from a variety of mathematical techniques
• Listening - can receive, attend to, interpret and respond to verbal massages and other cues 
• Speaking - can organize ideas and communicate orally

• Creative Thinking - can generate new ideas
• Decision Making - can specify goals and constraints, can generate alternatives, can consider risks and can evaluate and choose best alternatives
• Problem Solving - can recognize problems and can devise and implement plans of action
• Visualization - can organize and process symbols, pictures, graphs, objects and other information
• Reasoning - can discover a rule or principle underlying the relationship between two or more objects and can apply it when solving a problem

• Responsibility - can exert a high level of effort and can persevere toward goal attainment
• Self-Esteem - believes in own self-worth and can maintain a positive view of self
• Sociability - can demonstrate understanding, friendliness, adaptability, empathy, politeness in group setting and cultural skills
• Self-Management - can assess self accurately, can set personal goals, can monitor progress and exhibits self-control
• Integrity-Honesty - can choose ethical courses of action

Resources:

• Can allocate time - can select relevant, goal-related activities, can rank them in order of importance, can allocate time to activities and can understand, prepare and follow schedules
• Can allocate money - Can use or prepare budgets, including cost and revenue forecasts; can keep detailed records to track budget performance; and can make appropriate adjustments
• Can allocate material and facility resources - can acquire, store and distribute materials, supplies, parts, equipment, space or final products in order to make the best use of them
• Can allocate human resources - can assess knowledge and skills and distribute work accordingly, can evaluate performance and can provide feedback

• Can acquire and evaluate information - can identify need for data, can obtain it from existing sources or can create it, and can evaluate its relevance and accuracy
• Can organize and maintain information - can organize, process and maintain written or computerized records and other forms of information in a systematic fashion
• Can interpret and communicate information - can select and analyze information and communicate the results to others using oral, written, graphic, pictorial, or multimedia methods
• Can use computers to process information - can employ computers to acquire, organize, analyze and communicate information

• Can participate as a member of a team - can work cooperatively with others and can contribute to a group with ides, suggestions and effort
• Can serve clients/customers - can work and communicate with clients and customers to satisfy their expectations
• Can exercise leadership - can communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas to justify a position; can encourage, persuade, convince, or otherwise motivate an individual or group, including responsibly challenging existing procedures, policies or authority
• Can negotiate - can work towards an agreement that may involve exchanging specific resources or resolving divergent interests
• Can work with cultural diversity - can work well with men and women and with a variety of ethnic, social or educational backgrounds

• Can understand systems - knows how social, organizational and technological systems work and can operate effectively within them
• Can monitor and correct performance - can distinguish trends, can predict impact of actions on system operations, can diagnose deviations in the function of a system/organization and can take necessary action to correct performance
• Can improve and design systems - can make suggestions to modify existing systems to improve products and services and can develop new or alternative systems

• Can select technology - can judge which set of procedures, tools or machines, including computers and their programs, will produce the desired results
• Can apply technology to specific tasks - can understand the overall intent and the proper procedures for setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting machines, including computers and their programming systems

SOURCE: The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) The Commission issued its first report, What Work Requires of Schools, June 1991