• Adults who participated in early childhood education as children performed better on the reading literacy assessment and were more likely to have started primary education at the right age than those who did not participate.
• Adult use of foundational skills, such as numeracy, has been increasing, but there were differences in the assessment of these skills between males and females.
• Although the socioeconomic status of a child’s parents seems to relate to his or her perceived levels of socio-emotional skills, the educational system may also have an important role to play.
• Because solid foundational and socio-emotional skills are the basis for a worker’s acquisition of job-relevant skills, training and apprenticeship programs should do more to strengthen these sorts of skills.
• Socio-emotional and job-relevant skills can affect wages to the same degree as level of education.
• Workers who were successfully self-employed were more educated and more likely to take risks than the less successfully self-employed.
• A smooth transition from school to work seems to be related to people being more conscientious and emotionally stable.
• Some workers aspire to positions for which they do not currently possess the right skills; if they had better information about the skills needed, they would be able to seek education and training options to upgrade their qualifications.
• Businesses are not making full use of their workers’ existing skills. For example, employees are vastly underutilizing their employees’ computer skills in their jobs.

Most of the STEP results are reported at the individual country level and can be accessed on the STEP website.