Five years ago, Hagerstown Community College President Jim Klauber proposed the idea of Washington County working to achieve ACT Work Ready Community status. That goal is now a reality, with 106 businesses having signed up to participate in the program.
“I’ve seen the success of this program first-hand in other communities and I’m excited to watch its positive impact here,” said Klauber. “These businesses are quickly seeing the value of working with this designation. The power of broad partnerships, using WorkKeys NCRC and attaining the ACT Work Ready Community designation, will take our economic development to the next level.”
A group of nine subject matter experts in Adult Education formed a panel to align the CCRSAE to the benchmarks of WorkKeys. The panelists represent four states across the South, Midwest, and Northeast regions of the U.S. Results of the study help demonstrate a crosswalk with the Educational Functional Levels to help ABE programs optimize performance as working learns meet both career and education goals.
Enhancing the detail of the crosswalk are best practices from the Mississippi Community College Board, Hagerstown Community College in Maryland, and Metropolitan Community College of Omaha, Nebraska. Each guest contributes their perspectives on the importance of the alignment work and how it helps improve ABE programming. The panelists share what they gained in unique insights from the research that also helps demystify Strength of Link. Episode 30 concludes with tips to read and interpret the crosswalk along with a briefing on the new Move Ahead with Adult Ed campaign.
The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the extent to which the three WorkKeys assessments making up the ACT® WorkKeys® National Career Readiness Certificate® (NCRC®) crosswalk to the College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education (CCRSAE), a subset of the Common Core State Standards. Since the National Reporting System’s (NRS) Educational Functioning Levels (EFL) for Mathematics and Language Arts also use the CCRSAE as their foundation, the results of this study can be extended to demonstrate a crosswalk to the NRS EFLs. The ACT® WorkKeys® Curriculum is the only curriculum built from the ground up to align with the assessments. As a result, this crosswalk can also be used to demonstrate alignment between the WorkKeys Curriculum and the CCRSAE.
Thanks to the Appalachian Regional Commission, Washington County’s WorkKeys team has money available to help local businesses participate in WorkKeys Profiling. Job profiling establishes links between the requirements of a job or role and the knowledge, skills, abilities and behavioral characteristics necessary for successful performance in that position, according to a news release from the county. The team is currently working with Horizon Goodwill, Washington County Emergency Services and Meritus Health to provide this service. Conagra and Hub Labels have participated in the job profiling process.
Saying that Maryland businesses need “homegrown talent,” Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford praised local job-training programs Thursday.
Rutherford and Maryland Commerce Secretary Kelly M. Schulz were at Hagerstown Community College to help celebrate milestones in two training efforts.
The first was the formal opening of the new Energy and Trades Training Center on the HCC campus.
