Learning resources

Reading

Curated reading lists

These lists describe kinds of reading rather than prescribing a fixed set of titles, because availability differs between libraries and editions change. Take each list to your local public library — in Ottawa, the Rideau branch is a five-minute walk from our rooms — and a librarian can match it to what is on the shelf.

List 1 · Working with people

Look for practical books on conversation under pressure, negotiation and feedback, written by practitioners rather than by consultants selling a single framework. Two tests: does the book give you a script you could use tomorrow, and does it acknowledge situations where its method fails? Books that claim universal applicability are usually describing one industry.

What to skip: anything organised around personality typologies as a predictor of behaviour. They are enjoyable and weakly evidenced, and they encourage explaining a colleague instead of talking to them.

List 2 · Thinking and decisions

Judgement and decision-making has an unusually good popular literature, largely because the underlying research is experimental and replicable in parts. Read at least one book on cognitive bias and one on probability or statistics for non-specialists. The second is the more useful of the two and the less commonly read.

What to look for: authors who tell you the size of an effect and whether it has been replicated. What to skip: single-study anecdotes presented as laws of behaviour.

List 3 · Writing

Two categories: a plain-language style guide, and a book on structuring argument or business documents. Canadian and British style guides differ from American ones in punctuation and spelling conventions; if you write for Canadian organisations, choose accordingly and be consistent. A style guide read once and consulted often is worth more than three read cover to cover.

List 4 · Work and transition

For career change specifically, prefer books built on interviews with people who made transitions over books built on a single author's story. Look for treatment of the practical questions — income during transition, retraining costs, how long searches actually take — because the inspirational sub-genre routinely omits them.

Also useful: the labour market information published by Canadian federal and provincial agencies. It is free, unglamorous and considerably more accurate about wages and demand than most career books.

List 5 · Learning how to learn

A short list and a high-return one. Seek out material on spaced repetition, retrieval practice and deliberate practice from authors who cite the underlying research. Most of the useful findings fit in one book, and applying them changes the return on every other list here.

Reference

Reference documents

Short factual pages we maintain because the questions come up constantly at the support desk. Where a matter is governed by law or regulation, we point you to the official source rather than summarising it, because summaries go stale and the consequences of an out-of-date summary fall on the reader.

• Reference

  Employment standards: where to look

  Employment standards in Canada are set provincially and territorially, with federally regulated sectors covered separately. Questions about hours, overtime, leave, notice and termination should go to your provincial ministry of labour or the federal labour program. We can tell you which body applies to your situation; we do not interpret the rules for you.

• Reference

  Vocabulary of the workplace

  A plain-language glossary of about eighty terms that appear in job postings and performance conversations — scope, deliverable, stakeholder, escalation, capacity, secondment, probationary period — with what each usually means in practice as distinct from its formal definition.

• Reference

  Who does what in an organisation

  A one-page orientation to common functions — operations, finance, human resources, procurement, legal, communications — and what each typically needs from you. Useful in a first job, and in any move between sectors.

• Reference

  Finding help beyond this centre

  Where to go for the things we do not do: provincial employment services, settlement agencies for newcomers, accredited career practitioners, community legal clinics, and post-secondary continuing education. With notes on which are free and which are not.

Checklists

Working checklists

Checklists earn their place in situations that recur, matter, and are easy to get wrong under mild pressure. These six are short by design; a checklist longer than a screen is a procedure, and procedures do not get used.

Before you send a message

• Is the point in the first two lines?
• Does every request have a named person and a date?
• Is this the right channel, or should it be a conversation?
• Would I be comfortable if this were forwarded to anyone mentioned in it?
• Have I removed the sentence I wrote while annoyed?
• Is the subject line about the request rather than the project?

First ninety days in a role

• Met everyone I depend on, and everyone who depends on me.
• Understand the two or three measures my team is judged against.
• Know what “finished” means here, and who decides it.
• Delivered one small thing completely and visibly.
• Asked for feedback once, narrowly, and acted on it.
• Started an evidence file of what I have done.
• Written down what I found strange — before it stops seeming strange.

Interview day

• Route or link tested; joining early enough to fix a problem.
• Eight stories rehearsed, each under ninety seconds.
• Three concrete facts about the organisation ready to use.
• Four questions to ask, at least two about the actual work.
• One honest answer prepared for the question I least want.
• Copy of the posting and my own application to hand.
• Follow-up note drafted before the interview, sent after it.

Closing a meeting

• Actions read aloud: what, who, by when.
• Decisions stated in a form someone could quote back correctly.
• Parked items recorded with a destination.
• Anyone absent who needs the outcome, named.
• Notes sent within one working day.

Project close-out

• Deliverables confirmed in writing by the person who asked for them.
• Ongoing responsibilities handed to a named owner.
• Files in a shared location, named so someone else can find them.
• Contributors thanked specifically, in a place their manager can see.
• Two things recorded to do differently next time.

Before an absence

• Handover note current for each responsibility.
• Named cover for anything time-sensitive, agreed with them.
• Access granted before you go, not requested while you are away.
• Out-of-office naming the cover person and their scope.
• What can safely wait, written down so cover does not guess.

Templates

Learning templates

Three templates for study rather than for work. They pair with the continuous learning roadmap.

Printables

Printable resources

Every page on this site is styled for printing. Use your browser's print command and the navigation, search and footer links are removed automatically, leaving the content on a clean page.

Getting a good result

• Paper size. Pages are designed to work on both letter and A4 without reflowing awkwardly. Canadian offices generally use letter; A4 is common for materials shared internationally.
• Background colours. Leave “background graphics” off in the print dialogue. The templates are designed to be legible and economical without them.
• Duplex. The toolkit templates are one page each, so double-sided printing gives you two per sheet without splitting a template across a fold.
• Larger text. Increase the text size using the controls at the top of the page before printing; the print output follows the setting.

Running a group session from these pages

Employment centres, libraries, settlement agencies and post-secondary programmes are welcome to print our materials for group use, with credit to Wiltimply and without alteration that changes meaning. A workable session shape: print the career development worksheet for each participant, allow forty minutes of individual completion, then twenty minutes of paired discussion focused on the sections people left blank. Those blanks generate better conversation than any prepared discussion prompt.

Editorial

How we choose sources

Four criteria, applied by our editors before anything joins this shelf.

1. Is it usable this week? Material that only makes sense after a course, a subscription or a consultant is not a resource for a self-directed learner.
2. Does it state its limits? Sources that describe when their method fails are more trustworthy than those claiming to work everywhere.
3. Is it accessible without payment? We prefer library-available, government-published or openly licensed material. Where the best source is a purchased book, we say so and suggest borrowing first.
4. Would a practitioner recognise it? Everything on this shelf has been checked by at least one person who does the work described.

We review the shelf annually and remove items rather than accumulate them. If you know of something that meets these criteria and is missing, the support desk reads every suggestion — write to info@wiltimply.info.