If college degrees represent courses of instruction completed, what measures what a graduate can do with the knowledge obtained?

To an increasing number of employers and job-training experts, the answer is a Career Readiness Certificate. The CRC has now been fully recognized by 16 states since its fall 2004 introduction in Virginia. Additionally, nearly 30 states are either deploying certificates locally, in the process of developing a program around the certificate or have shown an active interest in doing so.

The certificate is mostly used for jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree, but it is becoming common in many fields in which people are educated at community colleges. As a result, community colleges are playing key roles in creating certificate programs, and many are starting to require the certificate for entry to or exit from certain programs, or linking programs to their ability to prepare students to obtain certificates.

Considering the state of the U.S. economy and the reality of globalization, the CRC is “an idea whose time has come,” according to Barbara Bolin, pioneer in the development of the certificate and president of the National Association for Career Credentialing. It is a myth, she said, that employers want educators to provide them with fully trained employees for specific jobs. Instead, given the rapid growth of skills requirements in today’s working world, she counters that employers would rather have educators provide them with employees that are “trainable” for any job.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years there has been a weakening confidence in the academic credentials with which people graduate from high school and college,” Bolin said. “The CRC is the perfect complement to those credentials.”

Even though the certificates have different names in different states, they are based on the same set of criteria, making them portable throughout the country. Now that the CRC, based on ACT’s WorkKeys assessments, has taken root in a number of states, ACT has introduced a certificate of its own. The ACT’s National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC) is, according to some critics, a redundancy of the many CRCs being offered at the state level. It is based on the same assessments and is therefore similarly portable.

Though Michigan is the only state offering the NCRC as its official work skills certificate six more states are talking about using the NCRC. States currently issuing their own CRCs may also purchase an ACT seal that can be applied to their certificates, adding them to this network.

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Source: Inside Higher Ed, July 9, 2008