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KeyTrain's new one-of-a-kind complete career readiness course! Find out more>>
 
THE BASICS:
KeyTrain is the complete interactive training system for career readiness skills, based on ACT's WorkKeys® assessment system and the National Career Readiness Certificate.
The National Career Readiness Certificate is the national standard in certifying workplace skills.  Requested and required by employers across the nation, the Certificate allows individuals to demonstrate their level of skill in the most common skills required for success in the workplace.
 
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Meet AYP , Increase graduation test scores, Create a career-ready emerging workforce
 

Reavis High School worked with their English and Social Studies departments to devise a schedule to teach specific components of the KeyTrain program over the course of four months.  They also allotted a class period once a week for 10 weeks for students to work in KeyTrain.  The goal was higher scores on WorkKeys assessment portions of Illinois’ high school progress exam, the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE).

 

According to Joe Simone, Humanities Division Chairman, “This final strategy proved successful as many of these students reached levels 5 and 6 status on the PSAE…We made AYP the last two years and we credit a lot of the success to our increased recognition of the WorkKeys assessment portion of the PSAE.”

 

Secondary Education

A growing amount of research indicates that high skill levels are required to succeed in today’s economy and that schools are having difficulty preparing students for their future in college or the workplace. One of the recommendations stemming from the Commission on No Child Left Behind involves an additional assessment in 12th grade to measure preparedness for college and career, including English and Mathematics.

 

Illinois pioneered this type of assessment with the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE). The PSAE includes the ACT and WorkKeys® assessments for Reading for Information and Applied Mathematics.  KeyTrain is used in more than 350 Illinois high schools - 110 in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) alone - to teach these applied skills.  More than 130,000 students have used KeyTrain at CPS for more than 400,000 hours.  Students completing at least one lesson in KeyTrain scored higher in Applied Mathematics by one level and in Reading for Information by one half level on average. 

 

Michigan has adopted an assessment called the Michigan Merit Exam (MME) that includes the ACT and WorkKeys Reading for Information, Applied Mathematics, and Locating Information – allowing student the opportunity to earn a National Career Readiness Certificate updon graduation.   In order to teach the skills required for the MME, KeyTrain is the curriculum of choice in Michigan.  More than 150 high schools in Michigan have chosen to use KeyTrain, including all of Detroit Public Schools.

 

In Georgia KeyTrain is the only WorkKeys Level 1 curriculum approved and recommended by the Georgia Board of Education, for Career, Technical, and Agricultural Education.  A recent study used as the basis of a Ph.D. dissertation showed KeyTrain users in special populations (such as at-risk and others) passing math and english portions of the Georgia High School Graduation Test at rates of 92 to 97% vs. non-KeyTrain users at 27-52%.
 

Post-secondary Education
Regardless of the path a student takes after high school he or she will eventually become part of the nation’s workforce.  Our nation’s community and technical colleges recognize this and are gearing up to provide training and certification in career readiness for their own students as well as for businesses in their community.  They play a dual role in developing the workforce and use WorkKeys assessments and KeyTrain as vital tools within each.
 

Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, North Carolina played a critical role in providing basic skills and vocational training to workers in an unprecedented local worker dislocation. WorkKeys® assessments and KeyTrain® provided the best system to help these workers assess and develop their workplace skills. Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training Emily Stover DeRocco presented the college with the top Recognition of Excellence (ROE) honor in the "Recognizing Special Populations in the Workforce" category at the National Workforce Innovations Conference.
 

Thomas Nelson Community College, Virginia: To help build the available workforce in the community for local businesses, Thomas Nelson Community  College, in  collaboration  with  the Peninsula Workforce Development Center, created a “pipeline” program using WorkKeys assessments at the PWDC that effectively screens potential candidates and assesses the skills relative to the skills needed for jobs with local companies.  Because TNCC had had such great success with the KeyTrain program while working with individual companies, in cooperation with major employers and the local Workforce Investment Board, TNCC created an open-entry-open-exit KeyTrain Learning Lab, staffed by coach/mentors, that is available for use by the community.   This project’s success resulted in an unsolicited federal grant of $2 million from the Department of Labor.

 

Contact us to learn how KeyTrain can be used in your WorkKeys system.
 
Copyright 2013 ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. KeyTrain and WorkKeys are registered trademarks of ACT, Inc.  Career Ready 101 and the National Career Readiness Certificate are trademarks of ACT, Inc.
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