Iowa colleges will use ACT assessments

“We need to fill the skills gap so the students we turn out are at the right level. That's what this is all about - if you grow the industries, you grow our economy, you grow our state,” Kirkwood Community College President Mick Starcevich said Thursday as Iowa community colleges announced a new initiative to test manufacturing worker skills.

Major manufacturers, through the Iowa-Advanced Manufacturing Consortium (I-AM), can test worker skills in an effort to learn more about their own work force. The WorkKeys assessments that will be used were designed by ACT Inc., and test takers can earn the ACT National Career Readiness Certificate Plus.

The colleges, in turn, can use their business connections to help circulate testing.

The testing will be paid for through a $13 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.

“We're streamlined our curriculum, we've evaluated what the work force skills need to be and then we're helping companies better understand what the specific skills are,” Robert Denson, president of Des Moines Area Community College, said at the announcement at ACT's Iowa City headquarters.

In recent years a need to fill manufacturing jobs across the state has become evident, Denson explained. Officials hope they also can use findings to better prepare students for manufacturing jobs.

“We have hundreds if not thousands of very good jobs open right now in Iowa, and those jobs are in what we call middle skill,” Denson said. “More than high school (but) no more than a two-year degree, and that is exactly the market that community colleges train into.”

“Working with local manufacturing companies, we find they don't have enough workers with the skills needed on the job,” added Amy Lasack, Kirkwood Training and Outreach Services director.

Manufacturing annually contributes $25.4 billion - almost 18 percent of the state's economy - to Iowa's gross domestic product, according to Kirkwood.

The I-AM program has asked manufacturing companies interested in taking part in benchmarking required occupational skills to contact I-AM representatives by May 15.