This comprehensive literacy assessment --- dealing with prose, document. and quantitative tasks --- provides results that profile a national sample of nearly 20 million participants in the U.S. Department of Labor programs that target people who are unemployed and seeking work or those in search of better jobs. The programs comprise by far the largest component of Labor's Employment and Training Administration activities.

The principal finding from this literacy assessment is that a substantial proportion of these workers and job seekers have minimal literacy skills. Even the 25 to 40 percent who are at the next highest level have skills that are often inadequate for career mobility or advancement. In all, about half a million JTPA trainees and 7.6 million people receiving Unemployment Insurance or services of the Employment Service have literacy skills insufficient for today's jobs.