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Work Ready Communities Initiative

What is the Work Ready Communities Initiative?

CFED and its partners in the Work Ready Communities Initiative (Initiative) have created a certification system for North Carolina counties, along with a strategic design for its demonstration in North Carolina’s Eastern Region.   A county is designated as "work ready" if its stakeholders prove committed to continuous improvement of their educational and workforce systems, and if it meets certain standards of educational and workforce quality on a 16-item certification index.  The Initiative will increase community engagement in workforce improvement issues, as well as provide policymakers with a comprehensive tool to evaluate a community’s needs. 

While currently intended for application in North Carolina, the concept of certifying communities as work ready has already taken off in Georgia and Oklahoma, with those states using more limited criteria.  The products and processes developed by CFED throughout the Initiative could be adapted for use in other states interested in using community certification to improve their education and workforce development systems.

What is a Work Ready Community in North Carolina?

A Work Ready Community is one that is both ready to learn and ready to earn.  It is a North Carolina county that is committed to improving the skill level of its workforce, and that achieves critical standards of workforce quality.  In a Work Ready Community, public- and private-sector stakeholders efficiently utilize the Career Readiness Certificate (CRC), the most widely recognized work-ready certificate among employers and educators across the country and a viable “work ready” proxy in North Carolina.  A Work Ready Community has a critical mass of employable workers, as conveyed by 25 percent of the labor force holding a CRC, and above-standard performance on institutional proxies of labor force quality (high school graduation rate, associate degree rate, certificate holders, etc.).    The Initiative also directly includes employers in the certification process by specifying thresholds for their involvement with the CRC.

Please contact Lisa Buckley at lbuckley@cfed.org for more information on the Work Ready Communities Initiative.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WORK READY COMMUNITIES INITIATIVE