Don't Want to Earn a GED? Consider the Career Readiness Certificate

            Maintaining a balance between learning and working, the WorkKeys and Career Readiness Certificate (CRC) programs have been used as a means of helping students obtain the core learning and skills needed to obtain meaningful employment in a career field. American College Testing (ACT), best known for giving a college entrance exam, oversees the program.

               According to its website, WorkKeys is a job skills assessment system that helps employers select, hire, train, develop, and retain a high-performance workforce. Their series of tests measures foundational and soft skills and offers specialized assessments to target institutional needs. (ACT website, 2015) It is used in community colleges, career centers, as well as in the Department of Corrections as part of its adult education program. Locally, Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia is one of the schools that offer this program.

But ACT has expanded far beyond the scope of simply testing pre-college students. As part of 

ACT's Work Readiness System, the ACT WorkKeys program has helped millions of people in high 

schools, colleges, professional associations, businesses, and government agencies build their skills to 

increase global competitiveness and develop successful career pathways. Completing the ACT 

WorkKeys assessments in Applied Mathematics, Locating Information, and Reading for Information 

can lead to earning ACT's National Career Readiness Certificate (ACT NCRC), a credential earned 

by over 2.3 million people to date, across the United States. Students may earn a platinum, gold, 

silver or bronze certificate, which can be taken to a future employer to prove work readiness.