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System Automatically Registers Certificate Holders
More than 100,000 additional National Career Readiness Certificate holders will be registered next year in ACT’s system as a result of the National Career Readiness Certificate initiative in Michigan.
The addition comes from the approximately 130,000 of the state’s high school juniors who will take WorkKeys® as part of the Michigan Merit Exam next spring. The majority of them are expected to qualify for National Career Readiness Certificates.
The National Career Readiness Certificate reporting system will streamline the registration of the eligible students into a national database of registered credentials. The system can also facilitate direct printing and shipping of paper certificates.
This process reduces the risk of errors that might be introduced if score data were manually transferred from one system to another for processing, said Terry Ausman, director of state and regional programs in ACT’s Workforce Development Division.
“Certificates are produced through an automated analysis of test scores that reside within the ACT data files,” said Ausman.
State workforce development offices, secondary and postsecondary schools, and national employer associations can use the automated system to register, print, and distribute National Career Readiness Certificates. They are provided access to spreadsheets that contain score and certificate data across all participating test centers.
Organizations can use data—such as the number tested per test center and date range and the number who earned qualifying scores for each level of certificate—to rate program effectiveness. They can also share data or test volumes with policymakers and funding providers. Access to the data also allows organizations to verify the correlation between training and increased skill levels.
“Reports derived from this data can be used in a variety of ways,” said Ausman. “Training programs can be effectively targeted to the right populations. States can compare the number of gold certificate holders to those in the general population. Michigan schools can demonstrate to parents and employers that their graduates are ready to work.”
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