The Massachusetts Career Readiness Initiative is a three-year pilot project lead by the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, with funding contributed by additional stakeholder organizations. The goal of the Massachusetts Career Readiness Initiative (CRI) is to implement scalable approaches to improving the basic skills of individuals who live on public assistance, cycle through unemployment, or struggle to break out of low-wage work. To achieve this goal the Career Readiness Initiative provides Massachusetts’ 32 One-Stop Career Centers, 15 Community Colleges and a selected group of 50 Adult Basic Education programs with ACT Career Readiness System user licenses.
The CRI represents an opportunity to align assessment methods, referrals and enrollments and ultimately helped to reduce the “remediation gap” that so many low-skilled job seekers face when trying to job hunt through the Career Centers, enroll in post-secondary or transition out of adult education. Through coordination among One-Stop Career Centers, Community Colleges, and Adult Basic Education Programs, the ACT Career Readiness tools can be used to address service gap s and facilitate participant transitions.
To attain these goals, World Education has been engaged by the Commonwealth Corporation, to provide capacity building and training activities to CRI participating organizations and regional Career Ready User Groups. Capacity building activities include: (1) supporting the Career Readiness Committee; (2) providing technical assistance to User Groups; (3) identifying national blended learning models that combine classroom instruction with self-paced, computer-based remediation tools using the ACT Career Readiness System; and (4) designing and delivering training to User Groups on best practices in blended learning.
The desired outcomes are to:
World Education strives to build lasting relationships with partners across diverse geographic regions and technical sectors to produce better education outcomes for all.
