Career Success: Integrating classroom instruction and NOCTI Workplace Readiness Assessments

My name is Christopher Gray and I am the Cooperative Education Coordinator at the River Valley Technical Center in Springfield, VT. I am new to the role of C.E. Coordinator, but I am not new to career and technical education. Over the past 19 years I have held a variety of positions in secondary technical education: Machine Trades Instructor; Technology Education Teacher; building level administrator; Project Lead The Way instructor; and Executive Director of Vermont SkillsUSA. I also have industry experience as a Tool Maker, a CNC Machinist and an Offset Pressmen. This combination of experiences has led me to the coordinator position that I presently hold.

Training of students in the “soft skills” associated with the workplace has been a high priority of mine as well as the teaching staff at the River Valley Technical Center for several years. When I was hired as C. E. Coordinator, my number one goal was to develop a program that would effectively integrate workplace readiness skills into a packaged curriculum that could be delivered to the nineteen different technical programs we offer at our center. The curriculum needed to address the twenty-one individual workplace competencies for which all Vermont technical center students are held accountable. Equally important was measuring each student’s attainment level. This is where the NOCTI Workplace Readiness Assessments came into play.

The course I developed is called Career Success. Currently it is taught as a 10 hour, classroom based, immersion curriculum. Instructors can either choose to enroll their students in a week-long intensive track that meets for two hours a day or they can spread the course over five weeks, meeting once a week for 2 hours. In either scenario, students are also given approximately five to seven hours of additional work outside the classroom to supplement the in-class instruction.

At the heart of Career Success are the eight core workplace competencies that are the focus of NOCTI’s Workplace Readiness Assessment. These competencies are Communication, Teamwork, Problem Solving, Information Technology Applications, Systems, Safety, Ethics and Employability. Each lesson and learning activity I use with the students is designed to address one or more of the competency areas. I draw from a variety of methodologies and pedagological strategies that I have stored in my instructional repertoire including cooperative learning, adventure based programming, and initiative skills. I also use the Littrell, Lorenz and Smith text, From School to Work, published by Goodheart-Wilcox, and the SkillsUSA Professional Development Program as foundation references for the course.

Once the students have completed the 10-hour Career Success course, I administer the NOCTI Workplace Readiness pre-test. The pre-test is equal in length and level of difficulty to the Workplace Readiness Certification test that NOCTI also offers. The pre-test costs $10.00 per student and provides invaluable data regarding each student’s strengths and weaknesses in the eight core competency areas. The real value in the pre-test is that it establishes a basis of communication with the program instructors. With the score data, we can begin developing additional “in-class” instructional strategies to include in the technical curriculum that will improve the students’ workplace readiness competence.

For example, a Carpentry instructor might learn that his/her students scored lower overall on the ethics section of the NOCTI pre-test. I would then get together with that instructor and we would research carpentry related examples of workplace ethics issues that he/she could then integrate into his/her daily lesson planning. Or, that instructor could invite me into that program area to give an additional lesson integrating ethics with carpentry.

The ultimate goal is to allow any student who wants to attain a nationally known Industry Recognized Credential, regardless of their technical field, to do so through Career Success and NOCTI. To date, more than sixty students in five different program areas at the RVTC have taken both the Career Success 10-hour course and the NOCTI Workplace Readiness pre-test. The scores on the pre-test are wide-ranging (as are the skills and the abilities of the students who took the assessment). It is our hope that any level two student who will be completing a CTE program at the end of the 2005-2006 academic year, has the training and opportunity to pass the NOCTI Workplace Readiness post-test with a 76.4% (cut score required to earn certification) or higher.