Virginia Yonkers just posted about a presentation she's doing on Work Literacy to a group of instructional design researchers. You can visit her post for more details. She asks for help and has some good questions:

• what should I include in my presentation?
• what research would you like those doing instructional design research to be conducting? In other words, what are some of the most pressing research questions that we, at the university, should be investigating?
• How can we tie the various levels of education together to better prepare workers for the workplace of the future?

There is a lot out there already around 21st century literacies and similar kinds of literacy frameworks.

I'm not sure what I would tell her to present. Certainly I would discuss what's happening in the workforce and the need for work literacy.

Still, the question is likely more around what should be done as part of education. My feeling is there are practical application (methods) and frameworks missing from existing educational literacy. For example, I look at what's in these literacy frameworks and don't see good stuff around network and collaborative skills. One of the biggest gaps that workers have is how to reach into their network and into other groups to find expertise, answers, find collaborators, etc. So, educational systems are not going to turn out people who have closed this gap.

I'm sure there are lots of others - just look at Michele's post - Masters of Technology for examples of gaps.