New Readiness Center expands core educational mission

Andrew D. Brosig
Posted 10/30/19

The General Educational Development test – or GED, as it’s more commonly known – has always been a route for students who’ve dropped out of high school to succeed.

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New Readiness Center expands core educational mission

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TORRINGTON – The General Educational Development test – or GED, as it’s more commonly known – has always been a route for students who’ve dropped out of high school to succeed.

Around eastern Wyoming, GED preparation and testing was the mission of the Eastern Wyoming College Adult Education Department. Adult Ed staff would help people get ready and administer the tests with the goal of achieving a high school equivalency certificate, which students could parlay into admission to a two- or four-year college or university and a shot at a career instead of just a job.

But, after changes in state law under former Gov. Matt Mead with the passage and implementation in 2015 of the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, how institutions of higher learning and communities at large dealt with education evolved. Today, the EWC College and Career Readiness Center does more than help students lacking a high school diploma get a leg up on their own futures.

CCRC effectively bridges a gap. It’s target audience for high school equivalency training is people age 16 and older who, for whatever reason, left school prior to graduating. But it’s also so much more.

“We are essentially – we still offer the same services we have for years, which is our high school equivalency,” said Callie Allred, CCRC director. “That was the focus of adult education.”

Now, the changes are about “having our programs partnering more together, having more integration of services within the communities,” Allred said. That means “providing more workforce readiness skills, along with college readiness skills.”

Courses through the CCRC can range from the basics – reading, writing and mathematics – to more “soft skills,” ranging from how to make change to proper workplace decorum to writing a business letter or email.

“One of the main things is the opportunity for local employers to work with us,” Allred said. “If employers are seeing a need for strengthened employability skills, strengthened academic skills in the workplace, we can partner together to create a focused, specialized training course.

“We can actually go to the work site – we call it our mobile classroom, or work site training.”

The CCRC is federally and state funded, so the workforce programs it offers are free, Allred said. To develop a training program, she visits with individual employers to find out what specific skills may be lacking – or may need a refresher – in their workforce.

Employability skills training is typically an eight-module course. Topics range from when on-the-job cell phone usage is appropriate – and when it’s not – to basic communication skills, she said.

“Particularly when we’re talking about generational gaps and different communication styles – from emails to letters and face-to-face, texting, all these things,” Allred said. “Communicating with your employer, communicating with other employees. Also, of course, communicating with your customers.

“Customer service skills is something we definitely hear is lacking in the workforce today,” she said. “Financial literacy is something else we talk about – what do you do with your paycheck, ideas about how to manage a budget, that sort of thing.”

To some, these may seem like skills that should be – and once were – taught in school. But, with the change in focus of public education today, they simply aren’t.

“I hesitate to speak about the educational system, but the general idea is that sense of a work ethic that was instilled in many of us in this country, somewhere along the line, has stopped being taught,” Allred said. “There’s been a lot of changes in our society, our economy, social media – the way people have not so much learned, but unlearned” those soft skills needed in the workplace today.

Another area of need CCRC is helping to address is the ongoing need for skilled tradespeople, she said. Helping students earn their high school equivalency and gain admittance to a trade or technical education program will help fill that need, Allred said.

“We don’t see the trade skills we once saw,” she said. “We have this entire, older generation with all these amazing skills who are going to leave the workforce and leave us with this big gap.

“We’re trying to create that opportunity to help that individual who really wants to go to work or really wants to go into a training program but is lacking some of the academic or workplace skills they need to be successful,” Allred said. “We’re not offering specific training in a specific job. Our training is specific to the academic needs of an individual for college or the workplace.”