NEWS - Work Force & Career Development

SBJ Staff Report

June 13, 2011 – President Barack Obama announced support last week for the goal to credential a half million community college students over the next five years with skills certifications designed to help build the educated and skilled workforce U.S. manufacturers need to successfully compete in the 21st century economy.

He cited the Manufacturing Institute’s National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)-endorsed Skills Certification System as a national solution. At the foundation of this system is ACT’s National Career Readiness Certificate, a gateway credential to the overall Skills Certification System.

The National Career Readiness Certificate is a widely recognized credential designed to validate the skills needed to succeed in all sectors of the manufacturing industry with the process managed by a the nonprofit arm of the NAM.

Obama traveled to Northern Virginia Community College with manufacturing leaders to explain the initiative. In many industrialized countries, students train for a specific industry versus a general, liberal arts education, with a focus on technical educations.

The concept is to build a career pathway for a student toward an occupation-specific certifications.

“The growth of our economy can happen only if the education and skills of our workforce also grow,” said leaders from the manufacturing sector traveling with the president.

In 2010, more than 457,000 individuals earned a registered National Career Readiness Certificate and many thousands more earned a Career Readiness Certificate from a state or regional program using the same ACT assessments and based on the same standards as the National Career Readiness Certificate.

More than 1,200 community and technical colleges across the nation are already equipped to administer the three WorkKeys® assessments that power the National Career Readiness Certificate. Many of these institutions also offer ACT’s KeyTrain® curriculum of online tutorials and skill-building software. In total, there are more than 5,000 locations where the proctored assessments can be administered to those seeking documentation of their essential workplace skills.

In January 2011, ACT released a report proposing that the U.S. needed to intensify national efforts to improve and validate the skills of the current and prospective workforce in order to correct the mismatch between skill demand and supply.

Entitled “Breaking New Ground: Building a National Workforce Skills Credentialing System,” the report provides a framework for discussion among educators, employers, workforce development officials and other key stakeholders. In the report, ACT states that community colleges are uniquely positioned to play a central role in fulfilling the training, education, guidance, assessment and certification functions required to sustain a national workforce credentialing system. Community colleges in particular touch many of the individuals who are restarting their educational journey in search of a degree or certificate; as such, community colleges will be the linchpins of the national workforce credentialing system.

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