WorkKeys: Workplace Documents

What Does Workplace Document Test?
This section tests your ability to read and understand typical documents you might encounter in the workplace. Such documents might include but are by no means limited to:  contracts or other legal documents, safety warnings or instructions, checklists, lists of instructions or procedures, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) guidelines, or employee memorandums.
Thus, there is a huge variety of literature that might appear on this section. Many of the more difficult passages, particularly those derived from legal documents, will feature technical or legal jargon you may not know. In such cases, you may have to use context clues and logic to draw conclusions about a passage.

What Do the Questions Look Like, and How Difficult Are They?
The difficulty of the passages and questions vary considerably as well. The most basic questions will simply require you to spot information in a relatively simple passage. The most advanced questions will require you to thoroughly understand complex passages and then use that information to draw a conclusion about a hypothetical scenario.

The passages and test questions are assigned a difficulty level between 3 and 7, according to the following criteria:
- Level 3: These passages are short and relatively simple; they are usually either bulleted lists or brief memorandums. The sentence structure is simple, and the vocabulary level is basic. Most of the questions are straightforward and require identifying details rather than drawing conclusions. An example of a Level 3 passage might be a note in the company kitchen explaining where to put food or dishes.
- Level 4: Level 4 questions also require test takers to identify details in the passages, rather than drawing complex conclusions.
However, Level 4 passages are usually longer, have more information, and are written in a more complex style than Level 3 passages, making those details more difficult to spot.
- Level 5: These passages may feature limited jargon, or more complex sets of instructions or details. Level 5 questions are less focused on identifying details from the passage, and more focused on drawing basic conclusions from those details. Examples of Level 5 passages might include company memorandums about software or computer systems.
- Level 6: Level 6 passages often include legal agreements or governmental or regulatory documents. As a result, these passages are usually written in a more formal, less readable way than Level 3-5 passages.
Level 6 questions may ask test takers to use context clues and logic to define terms in the passage. Other questions require drawing conclusions or explaining why a particular conclusion is correct or incorrect, based on the information in the passage.
- Level 7: These passages also include complex legal, regulatory, or procedural documents. However, level 7 questions tend to be a bit more difficult than level 6 questions.

What Strategies Can I Use to Do Well on This Section?
- Read the questions before reading the passage. By identifying what you need to look for ahead of time, you can more quickly read the passage to find the information you need. In addition, reading the question will give you an idea of its complexity. If the question is simply asking you to find a detail in a passage, it probably won't take nearly as long as a question that requires you to make a conclusion about a hypothetical scenario. If it looks like the question will be very time-consuming, you can skip it and come back.
Although the WorkKeys assessment is not an extremely time-intensive test, many of the Level 6 and 7 passages are quite dense and difficult, and you may have to read them multiple times to understand them. Therefore, if you answer the easier questions more efficiently, you will have more time to spend on the harder ones.
- Systematically eliminate answers that are obviously wrong. This will make it easier to focus on the remaining choices, and more importantly, you will improve your chances of correctly answering the question if you have to randomly guess.
- Use context clues to understand difficult words. Many of the more difficult questions require you to understand technical or legal terms you may not have heard before. Some questions will even ask you to explicitly define those words. If you don't know what they mean, you will have to use clues in the sentence to understand their meaning.

One effective way to handle unknown words is to highlight or circle them in the passage and underline other words in the passage that provide clues to their meaning.

As an example, try to use context clues figure out what the word “contraindicate” means in the sentence below:
Although Inventium is normally prescribed to relieve severe pain, a history of liver damage in a patient contraindicates its use.
Even if you don't know what “contraindicates” means, you can still figure it out from the rest of the sentence. The word “although” is key because it signals contrasting ideas. In the sentence above, we know that there's a (fictional) medicine, Inventium, that's prescribed to relieve pain.
The word “although” tells us that even though Inventium is normally prescribed to relieve severe pain, there are some situations in which that wouldn't happen, and the second part of the sentence completes the puzzle: you wouldn't prescribe Inventium if a patient has a history of liver damage. Thus, even if you don't recognize the word “contraindicate,” you can deduce that it means to signal somebody to not do something—in this case, liver damage signals a doctor to not prescribe a particular medicine.

You might have highlighted or underlined the sentence as follows:
Although Inventium is normally prescribed to relieve severe pain, a history of liver damage in a patient contraindicates its use.