‘Work Keys’ unlock job opportunities

Counties across the country are riding the wave of a growing trend of certifying their communities as "Work Ready."

Nationwide, there are several state-based work-ready initiatives to demonstrate that their counties' workforce has the skills needed by employers. These top-down efforts are initiated and supported by governors and state economic development officials.

Sign up for Work Ready Communities

But counties don't have to wait for their states to award work-ready credentials, according to ACT, a nonprofit trust, best known its college admissions exam.

Counties such as Gregg County, Texas and Sweetwater County, Wyo. have taken it upon themselves to get their communities recognized under ACT's Certified Work Ready Communities initiative.

When the program began in 2011, it was only open to states, which then got their counties involved. Now, since 2013, individual counties are able to apply on their own.

"We've got counties and regions that felt such a need to get this initiative up and running, that they didn't want to wait for their state," said Debra Lyons, ACT's vice president for community and economic development. States or ACT can designate counties as work-ready based on the number of individuals in the local workforce who have earned ACT's National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC) and the extent to which businesses recognize, prefer or recommend the certification as a factor in hiring decisions.

Photo by Daniel Prioleau/Longview News-Journal

Fred McConnel, economic development liaison with ACT Work Ready Communities, speaks to a group of local business and government leaders, June 18, 2014, in Gregg County (Longview), Texas.

U sing its Work Keys testing which includes applied math, reading for information and locating information ACT evaluates individuals' career readiness for jobs that rely on those skills, which Lyons said ACT research has shown are required for most "middle-skilled" jobs. In the aggregate, at the workforce level, economic developers can use credential attainment numbers as a selling point.

"It's a credential that companies consider in their location and expansion decisions, according to Mark Arend, editor in chief of Site Selection magazine.

"It's a quantifiable measure of how many workers there are with skills they may be looking for," he said. "States and counties really should be doing this because it separates communities that talk about their skill availability and communities that can actually demonstrate their available skill sets.

"It means that those states are applying the resources in the workforce development area at a rate that should be of interest to corporate site selectors."

There are no direct costs charged by ACT to counties to participate, but local administration of the tests is often subsidized by grants. And in some cases, employees pay to take the test, whose "wholesale" cost is about $30 per person, Lyons said. Costs can vary from county to county.

To launch a program, counties have to form a local leadership team, comprising stakeholders and thought leaders, and other program "champions."

Lyons said interested counties can apply online to be included in the next group to participate in ACT's Work Ready Communities Academy, to be scheduled for sometime this fall. The four sessions over 12 months are free, but participants are responsible for their travel and lodging. There they will learn about the Work Keys system, which comprises job analysis, assessments, training and curriculum, and certification.

Sweetwater County (pop. 43,800) kicked off its program in September 2014 with the support of economic development officials, the County Commission which endorsed the program with a resolution educational institutions, business leaders and major employers, according to Karla Leach, Ed.D., president of Western Wyoming Community College.

"We're in the process of educating our employers about this tool," she said.

Gregg County's (pop. 121,700) initiative started a few months earlier, in June. There, where Susan Gill is executive director of the Longview Economic Development Corp., the program is off to a good start, after a dry run a few years earlier.

"We started with the Work Keys assessment system in 2008 with two companies as pilots," she said, "because they were receiving a large number of applicants from the local workforce center, but they weren't really a good match. The employers would have like 50 prospects, and two of them were interview material for the position."

Gill added that in the county there are three major employers who have integrated the Work Keys assessments into their hiring process. For any participating county, ACT's Work Ready Communities website displays a list of employers in an area who recognize the credential, as well as the number of individuals who have achieved one of four levels of NCRC certification, based on test results: bronze, silver, gold or platinum.

Industry leaders and human resources professionals, in feedback to ACT, have described their experiences with the work ready certification program.

David Williams, a vice president with NW Natural, an Oregon natural gas utility, said, "We have profiled all of our non-bargaining positions. We require that applicants take the assessments and pass the minimum requirements for each job. In our hiring efforts, we advertise a preference for the ACT NCRC from applicants."

Nationally, there are eight state-led initiatives and 13 states with dozens of county-level programs, Lyons said, and more than 7,500 U.S. employers endorse the Work Ready Community Initiative.

"In order to really close the skills gap," she added, "it's going to take partners at the community and county level across the country, working together with a common framework we call link, align and match linking education and workforce development together, aligning workforce goals to economic development and matching people to jobs."

Interested counties can contact ACT now, Lyons said. "The more time counties spend in completing the application and building their team, I think, the more prepared they are to actually start the program and launch a successful initiative. So today is the right time for a county to reach out to us."