Workplace literacy--skills

Literacy is everywhere in our everyday life. Lots of new meanings of literacy appear in current society, like economic literacy, environmental literacy, health literacy and so on. The existence of these new meanings of literacy really doubles me from getting the exactly definition of literacy. Therefore, I have a thought in my brain which is that as literacy is traditionally defined as the ability to read and write, how about other skills that we possess, like technical skills and numeracy (mathematical literacy).

After searching on internet, I found a word, which is “workplace literacy”, that relative to what I meant other skills. Workplace literacy is defined as literacy services that are offered for the purpose of improving the productivity of the workforce through the improvement of literacy skills. It means a basic work and communication skills, those that are specific to job, not the ability to read books and literacy. These kinds of literacy skills is no doubt influencing the choice of employers, even some specific certifications are required for employees to gain more competiveness in the market. Now as we are still in the college, we have the opportunity to learn more literacy skills like computer skills, language skills, driving skills and public speaking skills. The more the literacy power we have, the more competitive we are.

As the result of searching for literacy for a few days, I still can not explain a definition that could describe all the meanings of literacy. Literacy is sourced from language, but gradually spread out into other fields of the human society. The only two words I think to describe literacy are “ability” and “power”. Literacy is an understanding and comprehending of life, as we gain more living experiences, we might be able to better say what literacy is.