Workers want good jobs, and employers want skilled workers. A new ACT national effort is helping participating states meet both demands.

Through its Certified Work Ready Communities (CWRC) initiative, ACT is partnering with select states to provide the training, marketing tools, data, and other resources they need to implement a workforce development framework to drive economic growth.

The community-based approach is grounded in certifying counties as Work Ready based on the number of individuals who earn ACT National Career Readiness Certificates (NCRCs) and the number of businesses that recognize, prefer, or recommend the NCRC.

“We can help individual communities in each state build a unified workforce development system that will be valued by both workers and employers,” said Martin Scaglione, ACT workforce president.

ACT selected the first seven participants—the states of Missouri, Oregon, South Carolina, Kentucky, Utah, and Wyoming, and the Dan River Region Collaborative in southern Virginia—through an application process, and will accept applications from additional participants starting early next year. Leadership teams participate in ACT’s CWRC Academy, a 12-month executive training program that guides them through a successful start-up and deployment of a statewide initiative based on the NCRC.

In collaboration with ACT, participants will set specific targets at the county level based on population and labor force data. Counties that achieve the targets— such as a certain number of NCRC holders and a specific percentage of businesses that recognize, prefer, or require the NCRC as part of their hiring processes—will obtain CWRC status.

The counties will be able to quantify the skills levels of their available workforce through ACT’s new data system that reports demographic information on the status of their workforce. The system will automatically update the number of NCRC holders. “ACT is uniquely poised to take our workforce and economic development tools and further integrate them into the workforce system to offer this community-based framework to our partner states,” said Scaglione.