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| The Manufacturing Institute, the education affiliate of National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued their new report in 2011. Download: Boiling point? The skills gap in U.S. manufacturing, a report on talent in the manufacturing industry sponsored by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute. |
| There is a very interesting project being launched by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the MacArthur Foundation. This WSJ article Merit Badges for the Job Market provides a nice overview. For more visit Mozilla's Open Badges project. |
| Kathy Conklin, executive director of the Saginaw County Business and Industry Partnership along with the Great Lakes Bay Manufacturers' Association convened a broad-based community discussion on work ready communites yesterday. Here's a link to my presentation Using WorkKeys to Build a Talent Supply Chain. |
| Pat Hayes and friends spent some time with the Senator to discuss the NCRC and WorkKeys. Read about the visit to Hoffer Plastics here. And, view a video here. |
| The Rapides Foundation is sponsoring an event to help employers and community leaders to understand the benefits of using the National Career Readiness Certificate to build a work-ready region in Central Louisiana. More here. |
| Kentucky made headlines with their commitment to join the Certified Work Ready Communites initiative. More here. |
| Anthony Carnevale and Georgetown CEW team released a new report yesterday: Hard times, Unemployment, Majors and Earnings, Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal. It is an excellent overview of earnings and unemployment for various college majors. Download here (20 pages). If you only have one minute, just look at the graphics on pages 7 and 8. And here is a related article in the Washington Post. |
| ACT published a new research report on the "skills gap"' based on ACT Skill Profile data and assessment data. This report clarifies the skills gap at all levels in four major industry sectors. Find a link to the report on our Employers page or download the full report here. |
| National Skills Coalition published Driving Innovation from the Middle; Middle-Skill Jobs in the American South's Economy this month for the Southern Governors Association. This report contains specific appendicies for: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Virginia, and West Virginia. |
| The Advocates recently compiled a list of employers - thousands of employers - that use certificates and WorkKeys in their hiring processes. If you know of employers that are missing from the list, please encourage them to sign up on their state certificate program website or send us a letter of support to post on our website. Letter of support forms can be found on our Employers page. |
| The International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) just released a report It's Not a Matter of Time: Highlights from the 2011 Competency-Based Learning Summit. This is a trend, that eventually needs to fully embrace the certificate as the optimal learning outcome credential for essential workplace skills since WorkKeys is based on the nation's largest and best empirical data for skills required in the workplace. Learn more here. |
| A survey of state directors of adult education directors by CAAL found WorkKeys and the NCRC to be in very strong use thoughout the country as the means to certify adult education students. Download Certifying Adult Education Students here. |
| The Work Ready Communities preconference at Workforce2011 attracted 50 participants from 20 states plus DC. The notes are posted on the Work Ready Communities page. |
| Georgia has issued over 200,000 certificates. Check out the Georgia Work Ready report to see their total. And, check out the Top Ten States ranking to find out the status of the leading states. |
| The Roadmap to Education Reform for Manufacturing lays out six principles for innovative reform, including moving to competency-based education; establishing and expanding industry-education partnerships; infusing technology in education; creating excitement for manufacturing careers; applying manufacturing principles like “lean” to reduce education costs; and, expanding successful youth development programs.
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| We generally upload PDFs because they download better and always print properly. We also have PowerPoint versions of key documents on the Presentation Materials page. Please visit that page if you want to find slides to use in your presentations. |
| We have been working on the website to debug all of the functions. We now have the blog RSS Feed and the Search functions working. The link to the RSS Feed Subscription is at the bottom of this page. Note: The search box on this page will only search blog entries. Use the search box on one of the main pages to search the whole site. |
| We searched the web for Career Readiness Certificate programs for all 50 states. The results were used to update the state pages on the Advocates website. A list of revised pages can be found on the Webmasters page. Please take a look at the state websites. Some of them are absolutely fantastic. And, if you see anything missing, please send us your input. |
| An official proclamation was signed by Governor Nixon designating March 17, 2011 as Career Readiness Day and a statewide summit of workforce and education practitioners was held in Jefferson City. |
| ACT released a new policy brief Defining Credentials for the Public Workforce System. This paper outlines how the National Career Readiness Certificate meets the definition of "credential as defined by the US Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration in TEGL 15-10. |
| The National CRC Advocates and the States CRC Chat Group are co-hosting a preconference best practices session on the topic of Work Ready Communities at ACT's Workforce 2011 conference on Monday, April 18, 2011. Download a copy of the preconference plan here. For more information visit the Work Ready Communities page in the Best Practices section. |
| Clayton Christensen, the man who coined the phrase Disruptive Innovation, has published a new report Disrupting College along with coauthors Horn, Caldera, and Soares. They propose a Quality-Value Index formula for accessing Title IV funds that includes 90-day hire rate, change in salary, and more. See Figure 11 on page 48 for details. This is an interesting way to provide a market mechanism for higher education. These ideas fit well with the Talent SCM ideas we've been discussing. Click here for comentary published by Inside Higher Ed, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, and Education Week. |
| Career Tech folks read this one. Harvard Graduate School of Education: Report calls for national effort to get millions of young Americans onto a realistic path to employablity. View the Harvard press release of the Pathways to Prosperity Project. Click here to read the Education Week article and here to download the Pathways to Prosperity Project report. |
| Lumina Foundation released a new report this week. Download the executive summary of the Degree Qualifications Profile here. The profile offers a new approach to accountability based on concrete performance criteria. |
| The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices invited us to present Talent Supply Chain Management to the Chairs of the State Workforce Boards at their next meeting on Friday, February 4, 2011. More on Talent SCM here. |
| Looking for best practices for your certificate program? View the NCRC Best Practices presentation we will be delivering to the Missouri NCRC Summit on February 1, 2011 in Jefferson City. And, for more on best practices use the links in the left column of the main site. |
| Oklahoma was the first state to schedule a Career Readiness Planning Institute. Oklahoma convened a CRC Summit in June 2010. That resulted in a strategic plan for Oklahoma's CRC program. Click here to view Oklahoma's CRC Strategic Plan. |
| We added a best practices page so that all of the links to the key best practice documents are in one spot. Click here on Best Practices to check it out. Or, click on Best Practices in the left column of the main site. |
| We revised the Employer LOC to remove the checkboxes and update the website address. This way going forward we will focus on employers that are going to commit to both (1) recommend the certificate and (2) give permission to use their name. Please download this new LOC form or modify your state or regional form to match. |
| Great blog entry in the Community College Spotlight on the value of certificates. Click here to view. The realities presented in this blog illustrate the value of good career coaching and sound decision making when investing in higher education. |
| DOL ETA released TEGL 15-10 on December 15, 2010. The subject of this guidance letter is: "increasing credential, degree, and certificate attainment by participants of the public workforce system." The letter includes a lot of good information on credentials, degrees, and certificates. |
| Michigan Governor-Elect Rick Synder gathered several educators from Michigan to define opportunities, goals, metrics, timetables, and action plans. One recommendation is that "Michigan should adopt common statewide placement benchmarks as agreed-upon standards for college and career readiness. ... Michigan should recognize ACT and WorkKeys systems as its common diagnostic placement tools for college and career ready assessment. The College and Career Readiness Subcommittee recommends that these changes occur by December 2011." This quote is from page 56 of the Final Report. This recommendation provides a basis for the continuation of our work to align high school education, postsecondary education, and workforce development with employers using the NCRC. |
| Doreen MacDonald reports on behalf of Saint Clair and Sanilac Counties a total of over 5000 certificates. Together they have: 1190 Bronze, 3015 Silver, 1059 Gold, and 21 Platinum certificates for a total of 5285 at the close of 2010. |
| We added an Employer Experiences database to the website today. This provides a space for articles, job ads, job postings, case studies, employer experiences, and individual experiences. Letters of Commitment (LOCs) are a first step. Ultimately, we want to post data that shows employers using the certificte to hire better people and data that shows individuals using the certificate to get better jobs. Click on Experiences in the top navigation bar to view the database. |
| We created an archive of the old blog to capture the history of the organization. We started as the Michigan NCRC Advocates early in 2008, then transitioned to the National CRC Advocates in February-March 2010. Our intention in adopting the name National CRC Advocates was to be respectful and inclusive of state sponsored CRC programs and at the same time to view our collective work as a national movement. Download the Blog Archive here. |
| We have some good news to share. We are taking the Advocates to the next step. Two big changes are occuring: (1) We are expanding the website so we can share a lot more information. Our website analytics over the last three years shows 30,105 visits, 135,133 pageviews, from 13,771 unique visitors. We have visits from all 50 states and 89 countries. Based on our review of the pages most frequently viewed, we'll be investing more time in the blog entries this year and adding more content. (2) We are going to make the Advocates a 501c3 nonprofit corporation. For the last three years the Advocates has been a project of Metrics Reporting. It is time for the organization to become a separate entity. Initial papers have been filed with the State of Michigan to reserve the name National CRC Advocates. The rest of the work is expected to be completed over the first part of this year.
We will be moving two databases from the old website to this one: (1) The Advocates database (Contacts) contains 1339 advocates, 1150 in our public database and another 189 private contacts. (2) The Employer LOC database (Commitments) contains 650 LOCs, 520 in the public database and another 130 in the private database. Once those are moved we'll be adding a third database. It will provide a place to store job postings, job ads, and employer success stories in a database that will be searchable by state and county just like the other two.
Thanks to each of you for your energy and support of the work,
Bill Guest, Executive Director, National CRC Advocates |
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