Valor Manufacturing offers the 180 Skills suite of on-demand, industry-specific skills training to meet student and worker manufacturing training needs across industries and organizations.

English for Specific Careers from BurlingtonEnglish offers specialized career courses with contextualized vocabulary, workplace success skills, and real-life workplace scenarios to help students succeed in current or new careers.

First Step Act: Best Practices for Academic and Vocational Education for Offenders, a report from the National Institute of Justice, examines the best practices and outcomes in correctional settings when skill-enhancing initiatives, such as remedial academics and vocational programming, are implemented. A key component of successful re-entry for ex-offenders is the acquisition of new personal, academic, and employability skills through participation in skill-enhancing programs while still incarcerated. Best practices include participation in an ESOL program until reaching a minimum English proficiency level of eighth grade, classes to build foundational literacy skills, high school equivalency programs for inmates lacking a high school diploma, and occupational education courses to prepare inmates for reentry after release. An innovative life skills and behavioral/cognitive change program called Breaking Barriers is specifically highlighted and could serve as a model for future correctional program design. Other findings show that when drug and alcohol intervention programs and therapeutic communities are implemented, there are positive outcomes in the effort to reduce recidivism.

This article describes how one in four employers now use pre-hiring assessments to find prospective employees. The assessments’ popularity is fueled by employers who no longer consider a college degree to be a measure of career preparedness and therefore no longer require a college degree. Employers also use pre-hiring assessments to ensure more equitable hiring, since fewer African Americans hold college degrees. Advances in technology and artificial intelligence make it possible to create assessments that measure whether an applicant can work in teams, communicate well, and make good decisions. Tech employers have been drawn to hackathons to find talented students who demonstrate their drive and ingenuity to solve a problem. Since COVID-19, with an increased number of job candidates, and health risks making it hard to meet in person, the use of pre-hiring assessments is growing faster than in the past.

The BurlingtonEnglish Career Exploration & Soft Skills blended course helps students learn English, identify career and academic pathways, and develop the personal and workplace success skills needed for career success.

The LEAD: Fostering Self-Awareness for Workplace Success training uses daily mini-lessons to help healthcare employees recognize and build workplace success skills.

Success Skills for CNAs Video Series offers six videos to help new and incumbent employees recognize and build workplace success skills.

Credential Finder is a search engine tool for exploring and comparing credentialing opportunities that are published to the Credential Registry.

Developing Soft Skills in CTE (Career and Technical Education) course for instructors offers strategies for personal and workplace success skills instruction, integration into programming, and measurement of skill development.

The Digital Literacy Toolkit offers digital skills training materials designed for adult education classroom instruction.