About the Work Readiness Credential

Background:
Advantages of Basing a Work Readiness Credential on EFF

Equipped for the Future presents a strong, research-based, customer-driven foundation for a new Work Readiness Credential.

Employers and workers from across the country worked with NIFL to define the EFF Worker Role Map -- a picture of what effective workers do in a high performance workplace. The EFF Worker Role Map represents an easy to understand picture of what effective workers do in a high performance workplace. It was developed through a structured feedback process involving workers and employers at every level in health care, hospitality, retail, and manufacturing. Our goal in involving a wide range of workers in this process was to create a cross-industry picture of what workers do. Defining broad categories of work responsibility and critical activities that workers perform to meet these responsibilities was the first critical step in our effort to identify the knowledge and skills adults need to be effective in their role as workers.

To assure that the picture of worker performance that resulted from this process was congruent with other major government workforce initiatives, our starting place was research conducted by the USDOL under the auspices of the Secretary's Commission on Assessing Necessary Skills (SCANS) and the O* NET Project.

The EFF Worker Role Map was the starting point for defining the EFF Content Standards. The Worker Role Map and Standards will be the starting point for defining our new EFF Work Readiness Credential. In January 2000 NIFL published EFF Content Standards: What Adults Need to Know and Be Able to do in the 21st Century. The 16 EFF Standards represent the core knowledge and skills adults need to be able to use in order to be effective not only in their role as workers-- but in their roles as parents/ family members and citizens/ community members. Because the EFF Worker Role Map represents a consensus picture of performance and is supported by a nationally validated set of content standards, it is an appropriate starting point for defining a portable, national work readiness certificate.

Equipped for the Future Standards are the foundation for customer-driven workforce development efforts across the country. Equipped for the Future Standards have already been linked to the Customer Service Standards developed by the Sales and Service Voluntary Partnership, and are being used to prepare jobseekers to meet those standards in retail skill centers established by the National Retail Foundation in five states. EFF Standards also have been embedded in Pennsylvania's Workplace Foundation Skills, the common ground for customized workplace education programs designed by Pennsylvania's Workforce Improvement Network (PA Win).

Equipped for the Future Standards have been adopted as statewide learning results for both adult education and workforce investment programs. Hawaii, Maine, Ohio, New Jersey, and Washington are among the states that have already adopted the EFF Standards to define desired outcomes for Even Start, adult basic education, and workforce investment systems. EFF is currently working with USED's OVAE to align assessment of the EFF Standards with the National Reporting System (NRS) for Title II of the Workforce Investment Act. In anticipation of the completion of this work (July 2003), 20 other states have begun the process of integrating EFF into their instructional and professional development systems.

Equipped for the Future Standards build workforce readiness because they provide a direct link between curriculum and instruction and achievement of real-world outcomes. Practitioners in states all across the country have found that the EFF Content Framework and Standards help them more systematically to focus instruction on the real world goals that bring adult learners to adult education programs. EFF professional development grounds practitioners in cognitive science research on how adults learn and develop expertise. As a result data from both teachers and program administrators show that students in EFF classrooms are more likely to use knowledge and skills outside of instructional settings, and to persist until they achieve their learning goals.

An Equipped for the Future Work Readiness Credential will assess performance of complex tasks of the sort that are required in the workplace today. The EFF Standards focus on application of knowledge and skills. The EFF approach to assessment of those standards takes advantage of advances in cognitive science research, psychometrics, and technology that enable measurement of cognitively complex behaviors.