It seems that employers are faced with global competition. One thing they are doing is subscribing to more and more severe levels of standards, things like the reduction of hazardous waste or hazardous substances, and ISO standards, and things like that. They realize that if they are going to be competitive, the people in their workplaces need to be able to read and write and handle math, and those kinds of things, so they can conform to those standards. At the moment, they are finding, because of low literacy levels, workers who cannot do anything more than the jobs for which they were hired; they cannot do any cross-training, and their ability to produce a flawless product is severely impacted by that. So anybody who wants to work in the global economy seems to be beginning to understand that the solution to the problem is to train in-house, and to train specifically for the needs of their organization. So I think they see it coming.
On October 24th, 2006. See this statement in context.