What is PIAAC and Why Does It Matter?

Skills provide an essential foundation for employment, health, individual and community well-being, economic growth, and active and informed citizenship. Knowing this, educators from elementary to postsecondary strive to develop robust literacy, numeracy, and other essential skills among students — and use a variety of tools to assess progress.

Canada has a relatively good track record of producing graduates with foundational skills that contribute to their own and others’ success, but less attention is paid to the state of skills among adults more generally despite their lifelong importance.

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) better known as OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills is one of our only direct measures of adult skills – offering critical insights about the importance, distribution, development, and use of essential information processing skills. While Canada’s skills community justifiably laments the lack of regular, robust adult skills data, PIAAC has been relatively underutilized. With new PIAAC data being released this week, now is a good time to reflect on what PIAAC is, why it matters, and how we might make better use of what it offers to help us better understand Canada’s skills landscape.

What is PIAAC?

PIAAC is the latest in a line of international surveys that help us understand levels, trends, and use of essential skills of working age adults in OECD member countries. Building on forerunners — including the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (AALS) — PIAAC measures adult proficiency in three primary information-processing skills essential for work and daily life: literacy; numeracy; and problem solving(1).

While PIAAC’s assessment of adult information-processing skills is the most well known and understood component of the survey, the survey also captures:

• How skills are used in workplaces and how demand evolves, by asking respondents which skills their jobs require (including literacy, numeracy, and problem solving, as well as cooperation, influencing, organization, physical, and other skills).
• Background information, including demographics (e.g., age, gender, race, location, immigration status); education and training (e.g., attainment, field of study, participation in training, and barriers); employment and income (e.g., employment status, occupation, industry, income); and social participation and health (e.g., trust, political efficacy, self-reported health status).

Together, these data enable researchers to investigate skills proficiency levels; how they are distributed; where skills are developed and used; and the economic and social returns to skills (2).

The first cycle of PIAAC took place over three rounds between 2011 and 2018 (3). Over 200,000 adults aged 16 to 65 from 39 countries completed the assessment. In Canada, 27,000 adults were surveyed which allowed for a robust picture for the population as a whole and analysis by age, gender, region, occupation, socio-economic status, immigration status, Indigenous identity, language spoken, educational attainment, and other characteristics. The first cycle showed that while Canada performed well internationally, there are areas of concern. Canadians’ numeracy skills are weak overall, and many populations are behind in all skills categories — notably, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and official language minorities. We will dive deeper into these findings in our next post.

Why PIAAC Matters

PIAAC is one of the only direct, comprehensive and reliable measures of adult skills. It illuminates the skills of Canada’s adult population, how we compare internationally, and who is excelling or falling behind. PIAAC also provides signals about how and where skills are developed and used, and the extent to which they decline over time. All of this provides a foundation to develop more effective skills policies and programs.

The OECD will release the second cycle of PIAAC data on December 10, 2024, covering 31 countries from 2022 to 2023, including Canada. As skill supply and demand continue to be shaped by global trends from technology and climate change to political and economic disruption, the second cycle of PIAAC should provide us with a good check-up on the skills landscape and reveal what more we need to know and do to improve the skills performance of all Canadians. Caveats and caution will be necessary when interpreting the data, but new PIAAC data should offer valuable signals amidst an otherwise noisy skills discourse in Canada and the OECD.

1. PIAAC Cycle 1 measured ‘Problem-Solving in a Technology Rich Environment’’. PIAAC Cycle 2 assesses more general ‘Adaptive Problem Solving’, which includes, but is not limited to, digitally-enabled environments.
2. PIAAC technical report 2019
3. First cycle took place between 2011 and 2012 and included 25 countries including Canada; the second cycle was between 2014 and 2015 and included 9 countries; the third cycle took place between 2017 and 2018 and included 5 new countries (The US was sampled for the second time in this round)

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint, official policy or position of the Future Skills Centre or any of its staff members or consortium partners.