You probably know that TOWES is a product developed and owned by Bow Valley College, a public post-secondary institution located in Calgary, Alberta.  The development of TOWES began about 11 years ago as an applied research project to create a new type of assessment tool that could measure skills in the context of work. Turns out that the assessment tool that came to be known as TOWES proved to be a very accurate assessment of skills used to complete daily tasks.

Our first customers were businesses such as Suncor Energy Inc, Syncrude Canada, and Boeing Aerospace who used TOWES to recruit workers with skills sets that matched the requirements of safe and productive work in their organizations.  We developed a distributorship system that includes 43 colleges, NGOs and Aboriginal organizations located in every region of Canada. This distributorship system introduced TOWES to their business customers and we were proud to add other organizations like Toyota, Ontario Northland Railroad, and Marine Atlantic to our business user list. Our partner/distributor colleges use TOWES in the mining, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, and security sectors.

The traditional mandate of community colleges is to educate and train the workforce of their community and so it is a natural progression for TOWES to round out an existing product line that consists of more than 20 different versions of the test bank, two online versions and seven French language versions with new training, certification, and consulting programs.

 Included in this edition of the TOWES Times are articles on an online training program designed to improve essential skills of participants. The new program named TOWES-Essential Skills Online (ESO) is designed using a simple easy-to-use platform. It uses authentic documents and actual work place tasks as source materials for chapter and lesson development. It includes a voice-over feature that actually reads the text as the learner uses the program.  We conducted field tests with immigrant bridging programs in community colleges.  And it works – we found that when scores between the pre- and post-test were compared, people, on average, increased by about 22 points and 45% of participants increased a full skill level after an average of 5 hours using ESO. The online feature, the simple and effective platform, and the voice-over option should provide opportunities for a wide variety of learners, workers or participants in career development programs. It provides training from level 1 to level 3 on the TOWES/IALS scoring framework.

The early success of the program enabled TOWES to secure investment to create new versions suitable for the healthcare, aerospace, petroleum, and automotive sectors, as well as the specific needs of pre-apprenticeship programs. In addition to the voice-over, Fanshawe College will assist in the development by researching the use of assistive technology options which should improve its use by adults with undiagnosed learning difficulties. This is a product in development; we will need field testing partners. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at towes@bowvalleycollege.ca.

As the use of TOWES continues to expand, we find the need to provide training for new test administrators. An online training program is being developed to assist our distributors and their third party partners to ensure that fair and equitable testing procedures are followed. An emerging product for our talented group of staff is the provision of consulting services to businesses and other colleges, including workforce analysis, training of TOWES practioners, immigrant bridging, and new product development.

Some of these new products are ready to go, while others are still under development. It’s a new year, and a good time to introduce new products. If you are interested in any of these new products, please contact the TOWES distributor in your region or go to the TOWES website at www.towes.com.

Conrad Murphy, Director of the TOWES Department

 If you have not already done so, please take a few minutes to fill out the annual TOWES Customer Service Survey