Become a Certified Work Ready Community

Participation in the ACT® Certified Work Ready Communities initiative is by application from state-level leadership teams. The initiative launched in December 2011; Missouri, Oregon and South Carolina were in the first round of participating states and are making great progress in moving their state initiatives forward. Utah, Wyoming and the Virginia-Dan River Region Collaborative joined Round II in 2012. Michigan was among the first states to join Round III in 2013.

If you are a governor’s office policy leader, commerce or economic development commissioner, state workforce agency, state chamber executive or lead business organization, please click here to download the current application. If you are interested in applying, please contact Chris Baucom at chris.baucom@act.org or 319-333-8647.

We plan to offer entry points to this initiative until every state that wishes to participate has had the opportunity to do so.

If you are affiliated with a county or region, feel free to contact us for advice on setting up a statewide leadership team and infrastructure. Please note that participation is not yet open to individual counties on their own without being part of a state-led effort, but we are working on a county-level CWRC initiative and expect to launch that soon.

Participating states receive:

  1. Acceptance to ACT's CWRC Academy
  2. Process to build a framework to on board and certify all counties
  3. Common fundamental criteria to establish baseline goals for county certification
  4. Communication tools to help message initiative to key stakeholders
  5. Monthly data updates via this website to track progress against goals

NCRC data for non-participating states is also reported on this website, but without common criteria goals and business engagement data.

This website reports the ACT® National Career Readiness Certificates earned at the county and state level and the progress being made by those participating states and counties in the ACT Certified Work Ready Community initiative. This site only represents data stored in the ACT RegiSTAR™ system, a web-based reporting and management tool for National Career Readiness Certificates.


State and national NCRC data runs from January 2006 through , while county-level data is starting from January 2012. State job profile data runs from January 2007 through , while national job profile data reaches back to 1993. Again, please note that county-level NCRC data collection began in January 2012 for WorkKeys Internet Version, and in July 2012 for pencil and paper assessments. State and national certificate totals include historical data prior to 2012.


WorkKeys® assessments are used across the nation, and many states have built their own Career Readiness Certificates based upon WorkKeys assessment results. You will find an asterisk denoting those states. This website will continue to evolve as the first two rounds of participating states give us feedback on what they would like to see -- and based on your feedback, as well.


Please contact us if you have comments, questions or would like to receive more information.