Rationale for Making Career Readiness the Top Priority of American Education
Article by Leo Reddy, Chair and CEO, Manufacturing Skill Standards Council® and Co-Chair, Working Group on Career Development Credentialing, Coalition for Career Development
“To help implement career development as the first goal of American education, the U.S. needs to require all students to have a personalized career pathway plan by Grade 9 assisted by a new cohort of certified, full-time career development professionals in every high school and a full-time career development specialist in every county and state capital.”
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“The foregoing Pew Research report on the growing importance of technical certificates to the general public underlines the importance of criteria for assessing the quality of the growing proliferation of so-called “industry credentials.” Given MSSC’s nearly 20 years of experience as one of the most vetted national certification bodies, the MSSC Board distributed a set of “guidelines” for federal and state agencies last October to evaluate the quality of “industry-recognized certifications.” These guidelines, while more detailed, have the same basic structure as do those used by the Department of Defense for selecting civilian credentials for use with active duty military personnel.
These requirements are essentially that the certification has to be (1) accredited by a nationally-recognized third-party accreditation body (e.g, NCCA or ANSI); (2) represent an entire industry, industry sector or major occupation and be nationally portable; or (3) endorsed by a leading national industry association. These criteria would apply only to well-known industry national certifications such as MSSC CPT®, AWS, NIMS, SME (manufacturing); ASE (auto service), NCCER (construction); CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco (IT); quality control (ASQ); supply chain management (APICS, IMS), distribution-logistics (MSSC CLT)®.”
Please click here for the MSSC-suggested Board QA Guidelines.