What’s in it for you?
What are Essential Skills?
Essential skills are the learning tools we all need in work and life. They are used in the community and in the workplace, in different forms and at different levels of complexity. Talking with a colleague and brainstorming new ideas, reviewing safety instructions for a dangerous substance, preparing an operating budget for a small business, or studying new processes in a trade, require a certain level of essential skills competency.
Why Teach Essential Skills?
Essential skills are required in many aspects of the piping trade, from reading blueprints to calculating pipe measurements, planning a project to delegating project tasks to a team. These are some of the skills used every day by apprentices in their training. Including Essential Skills training in your curriculum is essential to the success of your students.
The goal is for these life skills to transfer beyond the two weeks of training in your classroom, into the student’s further education, work, and life. It’s important to integrate the essential skills into the trade-specific curriculum as much as possible. This website will provide you with many resources to do this and support you in your efforts to, in turn, provide a more practical learning experience for your students.
What’s In It For You?
When your students are successful, you are successful. It’s a direct reflection on your abilities to support the student in their learning, resulting in greater pass rates for the school.
Using the tools and resources available on this site, you may become a more effective instructor as well. Learning to teach for different learning styles and understanding what your students need, will increase your capacity to work with a more diverse student population.
This site will provide you with access to many new resources from educational providers across the country. The UA PIC BC wants instructors to have a range of tools to assist in their lesson planning and include essential skills in their curriculum.
Participate
You are encouraged to share your teaching resources on this site, as others have provided their tools for our use here. In the Instructors menu, you will find a “Contribute” page on which you will be able to share ideas, feedback, and teaching aids with your fellow instructors. Click here to go to the Contribute page.
