Easy Guides was inspired after founder CEO saw the difficulty people had getting their forklift license.
Photo: Jude Freeman
Illiterate Australians and those with English as a second language are no longer being ostracised by the workforce, as a local Melbourne company, Easy Guides is making it easier for people with low level English language skills to gain the necessary TAFE qualifications.
Easy Guides was created by Melbourne’s James Tennant, who saw a need to cut through technical jargon and make qualifications more accessible.
His solution was a series of books that used illustrations to teach students the technical concepts.
“I looked at document usability and how you can make documents easier to read – how you can lower the reading level and add pictures and make it a lot easier to read for workers,” Mr Tennant said.
Mr Tennant’s background as an industry teacher focusing of workplace English and his volunteer work at the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre helped him identify a huge gap between educational needs and formal programs.
“A lot of people were having trouble with their forklift licence because the government test was written in very formal English – it still is, all these years later they haven’t learnt. People were really struggling. I’m not really an artist but I started sketching drawings of all the questions and answers in the test and found that really helped,” said Mr Tennant.
The project started almost 20 years ago in 1996 as a project for Mr Tennant’s masters degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Another Language (TESAL).
“I thought (that) if I’m going to spend all this time at home, all my weekends and nights studying, I want to do something practical,” he said.
From a small project in his home, Easy Guides has grown to employing 10 people and moving into more accessible ways to assist people in completing their education and gaining job skills.
“It’s just grown from that idea to do everything in a picture-based way. It’s not just books, now we also do multimedia,” Mr Tennant said.
“We’re just getting into the online market now where people can study for their forklift online, but we do lots of other machines besides forklifts.”
