TEXAS Adult & Family Literacy QUARTERLY

Adult Education Responds to Workforce Needs With a Focus on Rider 82

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Browsing the Web, TCALL staff found these literacy-related sites particularly relevant, helpful, or just plain fun.

O*NET Resource Center is the nation’s primary source of occupational information. Here you will find news and information about the O*NET program. This site is your source for O*NET products, including O*NET data, career exploration tools, and reports. It defines distinguishing characteristics of an occupation with descriptors in six domains. The O*NET-SOC taxonomy includes 812 occupations. O*NET OnLine is a Web application for job seekers, employment professionals, and others interested in exploring occupations through O*NET.

The Massachusetts Worker Education Roundtable is a network of worker education programs dedicated to promoting partnerships of employers, unions and educators that provide high quality education as well as training for Massachusetts union members. Programs that develop partnerships with employers, unions, learners and educators are programs that succeed. Every workplace has its own culture and its own set of learning needs. Roundtable has developed tools to determine these needs for each workplace, and tailor program development to those needs. Whether your workplace needs basic skills, English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), job training, leadership development or any lifelong learning, they can provide the expertise to make it happen.

NCCER: National Center for Construction Education and Research is a not-for-profit education foundation created to help address the critical workforce shortage facing the construction industry and to develop industry-driven standardized craft training programs with portable credentials. Their Mission is to build a safe, productive, and sustainable workforce of craft professionals.

The NCCER Core Curriculum is an Introductionary to Craft Skills certification that includes instruction modules in basic safety, construction math, introductions to hand and power tools, introduction to blueprints, basic rigging, and communication and employability skills.

Rider 82 Curriculum 2007 Pilot Report Findings. See complete report in PDF or Executive Summary. [PDF - 2272KB Adobe® Acrobat® Reader] During the fall of 2007, at the request of state leadership, the Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy and Learning (TCALL) assisted with the El Paso Community College (EPCC) pilot of the Rider 82 curriculum. This pilot consisted of three industry-related curricula (Sales and Service, Healthcare, and Manufacturing) each consisting of four modules. Each module had five lessons. Each lesson had four components: English as a Second Language [ESL], math, technology, and employability. It was anticipated that most programs would complete one module (5 lessons) in approximately 50 hours. The overall goal of the industry-related curricula was to assist students with learning job related English for employment sectors that are growth industries in their communities.

Pennsylvania now offers WorkABLE grants (AE funds) to encourage adult education programs to incorporate workforce topics into AE curricula. Programs receiving grants are asked to use the Foundation Skills Rubric to document and report work-based project learner skill achievement and competencies, and to take advantage of professional development opportunities.