National program measures employability in a community
It’s good to have standards, and even better to have vision.
So while a small group of community leaders works to meet goals that will earn Greenville County the distinction of becoming certified by the nationwide Work Ready Communities program, they are looking beyond those goals to Greenville’s future.
Dick Wilkerson was president and chairman of Michelin North America for three decades and is now a member of the small steering committee leading the county’s Work Ready certification effort. Work Ready promises major benefits for Greenville because “it sets measurable objectives and gets everyone around those objectives,” he said.
“Everyone” includes various parties focused on employment, education, health, economic development and other sectors of the community. Overhauling the workforce to meet the demands of a changed economy requires the comprehensive approach that only comes from these groups working together, Wilkerson said – but so far, the approach has been piecemeal.
Getting With the Program
The Work Ready program is administered by Iowa-based ACT, the nonprofit that administers the standardized tests by the same name that students take as an alternative to the SAT. Just as the test gives universities an objective measurement of a potential student’s performance, Work Ready gives companies and communities way to gauge overall employability in the community.
Target areas include high school graduation rates, soft skills development, business support and the number of National Career Readiness Certificate holders.
As of Aug. 31, Greenville County had attained 66 percent of Work Ready goals.
At its core is the WorkKeys assessment, which gathers detailed information about what skills are needed to do a given job and assessments that allow workers to gauge their aptitude for jobs. Aptitude is measured at three levels: bronze, silver and gold. From that assessment, workers are issued a National Work Readiness Certificate (NWRC), which staffing experts say may eventually replace the high school diploma as the measure of job readiness.
Work Ready sets targets for the number of employers that should recognize the NWRC. Greenville County’s goal is 301, and so far seven businesses have officially signed up.
Wilkerson believes increasing the response is just a matter of getting the word out. The support is there, he said, but so is the administrative challenge of educating hundreds of companies and getting them signed up. The plan is to reach the goals by March 2015, but they will likely be reached by next summer.
Going Further
A major selling point for Work Ready Communities is that it helps communities attract employers. Asked how much difference that assistance will make in Greenville, Wilkerson said, “some, but our objectives ought to be well beyond this.”
That is why representatives from businesses, education and government have come together to make it work. Such diversity is built into the Work Ready program, and Wilkerson wants more.
He is a passionate advocate for early childhood education, for instance, and believes organizations such as the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) should be a part of the discussion on job readiness. He sees a direct and crucial connection between the regular visits NFP nurses make to the homes of vulnerable first-time mothers and the workforce that will emerge as their children come of age.
Then there’s the attitude shift that would make manufacturing and related jobs seem attractive again, and Wilkerson said primary and secondary schools are largely responsible for that. Wilkerson said students must understand the prosperity that can come from manufacturing, that it can be interesting and stimulating work.
“There’s a crying need for everything, but technical jobs are even more needed and harder to fill right now,” Wilkerson said.
Statewide Approach
Removing cost barriers is one way to push the effort forward, said Susan Pretulak, vice president of economic and workforce competitiveness with the SC Technical College System. The state is one of four pilot sites for the program. Clarendon County became the second Work Ready Community in the nation in August 2013, and the first in South Carolina.
Pretulak said the state negotiated a statewide contract with ACT to provide some no-cost assessments in order to get the process going. Only a few counties like Clarendon did not wait for the extra incentive, but Pretulak said more are sure to follow now that the contract is in place.
The intent of this enterprise “was for us to put in place an initiative where counties had no excuse not to meet their goals,” she said.
Will it pay off?
“Well, we’ll definitely see,” Pretulak said. She, too, hopes South Carolina communities will aim higher than just attaining the goals. She notes that the bronze level certification, the base level, only qualifies people to do 16 percent of the jobs in the United States. She echoed Wilkerson’s notion that the goal is to foster a sustainable system to address problems, and expects the process to evolve and perhaps look a little different after 2015.
“There’s not a cookie-cutter approach,” Pretulak said. “I think you’ll see more creativeness now that everything’s in place.”
