WECD serves regional businesses and employers by providing customer focused workforce solutions to develop and sustain a qualified workforce. Customized contracted training is designed to meet the training and educational needs of business, industry, government and professional organizations in support of economic development and community enrichment.
Custom Designed Training
Business organizations are often confronted with a wide range of employee training needs that are highly unique to them. WECD can design, develop and tailor training and delivery approaches that align with these distinct needs, scheduling demands and budgetary circumstances. The division offers an extensive curriculum of technology, business, and professional development programs, and can integrate and customize these resources to best fit needs or design an entirely new course or program.
Through organizational consulting, a thorough assessment is conducted of an organization’s needs using various resources such as surveys, facilitated focus groups, and job profiling.
Professional workforce training staff partners with clients to:
- identify the needs that impact business processes;
- develop solutions that fit the company needs and culture;
- deliver training or consulting services that provide a return on investment.
Benefits to Business and Industry:
- Courses and programs can be tailored as academic credit or career credit.
- Courses can be delivered to meet the dynamic needs of client scheduling demands.
- Courses can be offered on-campus or on-site.
Examples of Custom Designed Training:
- Customer Service
- Industry-Specific Skills
- Job Skills Assessments
- Leadership Foundations
- Occupational Spanish
Job Skills Assessments
WECD stands ready to help area employers, and new employers coming to the area, with assessing workforce needs and incumbent worker skills. Assessing candidates at the early stages of the hiring process ensures that employers save interviewing time and effort, and identifies strong candidates beforehand. For current staff, assessment can be the key to putting employees into a position in which they can be successful, based on their current skill and competencies.
Assessment can also provide the very best employees with an achievable career pathway for them to grow into an even more valuable employee.
WECD offers an assortment of skills assessments for business and industry, which include: Bennett Mechanical, DiSC Personality Profile, HAY Aptitude, In-Basket, Management Readiness Profile, Perdue Pegboard and Assembly Test, Ramsay Combined Basic Skills, Wonderlic and WorkKeys.
Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test (BMCT) is a widely used and extensively validated assessment of mechanical aptitude. For more than 60 years, this instrument has helped organizations select the best candidates for mechanical, repair, and industrial occupations. The BMCT can help identify candidates with good spatial perception and mechanical reasoning abilities, as well as with an aptitude for learning mechanical processes and tasks.
The DiSC® Personality System is the universal language of behavior. Research has shown that behavioral characteristics can be grouped together in four major divisions called personality styles. People with similar styles tend to exhibit specific behavioral characteristics common to that style. All people share these four styles in varying degrees of intensity. The acronym DISC stands for the four personality styles represented by the letters: D (Dominance); I (Influence); S (Steadiness); C (Conscientiousness).
DISC materials can be utilized to:
- learn about what motivates each team member;
- help individuals maximize their personal strength
- enhance teamwork among an organization’s staff;
- motivate others toward greater productivity;
- resolve internal conflicts and power struggles more quickly;
- develop motivated teams.
eSkills assessments offer employers customization in pre- employment testing and employee development. eSkills is an assessment partner with PHCC who provides an extensive list of skills tests covering areas from the MS Office® suite, Typing, IT, Language, to Healthcare and a range of other subjects.
HAY Aptitude Test Battery identifies candidates with the necessary clerical skills for accounting, billing or shipping positions to help improve the efficiency and profitability of the operation. They measure a job candidate’s ability to compare numbers and names for accuracy, use short-term memory effectively and quickly identify numeric relationships. HAY test scores reflect both the speed and accuracy with which the candidate performs these basic tasks. Using the HAY Aptitude Test Battery as part of the employment testing process will help reduce document, shipping, and other process errors. Production and turn-around time will decrease as fewer discrepancies arise and customers will have increased confidence in product and service delivery.
The Management Readiness Profile (MRP) is an assessment tool that identifies the readiness of candidates for management responsibilities. A better fit between managers and their leadership responsibilities means more effective work teams, higher morale, lower turnover among top performers and maximum profitability. In addition, the MRP contains a Validity-Candidness scale that measures the extent of socially desirable responses. Lower scores indicate a tendency to exaggerate positive qualities and minimize negative traits.
Ramsay Combined Basic Skills. Ramsay Corporation is a leader in the creation and validation of tests for skilled technicians. With over 35 years of test development experience, Ramsay Corporation has created a series of off-the-shelf testing products to assess maintenance, production, and operator workforces. These online assessments are suitable for pre- employment assessment or pay-for-knowledge programs and can be used when custom validation is not required. The basic skills tests measure skills that could be reasonably expected from all job candidates as the basic requirements for learning and performing entry level or lower level jobs in manufacturing, processing, or operating.
Wonderlic provides employee assessments for each phase of the hiring process. Employment tests include job-specific screening questionnaires, cognitive ability tests, personality tests, skills tests and surveys. Used individually, these employee assessments provide valuable enhancements to an existing employee selection process. Combined, they efficiently gather relevant information and provide a comprehensive “whole person” view of candidate qualifications for efficient, objective employee selection.
WorkKeys is a national job skills assessment system measuring “real-world” skills that employers believe are critical to job success. This system enables educators to identify gaps between student skills and employer needs, which will, in turn, improve students’ success in entry-level and subsequent jobs. WorkKeys enables businesses to reduce turnover, overtime, and waste while increasing morale through effective selection decisions and training processes.
As a WorkKeys service scoring center, WECD handles job profiles, testing and scoring.
Skill areas:
- Applied Mathematics
- Applied Technology
- Business Writing
- Listening for Understanding
- Locating Information
- Reading for Information
- Teamwork
- Workplace Observation
Pre-Employment Training
Pre-employment training is a proven method to identify the best applicants in the community and train potential employees on key elements of the job. The pre-employment training program includes assessment of applicants on skill areas specific to the needs of the employer and development of a customized, generally short-term training class.
Sample Pre-Employment Format:
- Company Orientation and Expectations
- Company-Specific Training
- Interpersonal Skills
- Job-Specific Skill Assessments
- Quality Assurance Training
Training Programs
WECD has an extensive inventory of licensed industry training products. Experienced, certified facilitators can deliver any of the following training programs from the different training partners in the resource library:
- Communication Skills
- Computer Applications
- Customer Service
- FiSH
- Industry-Specific Skills
- Leadership Foundations
- Mixing Four Generations in the Workplace
Training Partners:
- AchieveGlobal
- CRM Learning
- Development Dimensions International (DDI)
- DiSC Profiles
- InScape Publishing
- National Retail Federation Customer Service and Retail Training
- Organizational Performance Consulting
- Vital Learning
Workforce Solutions
WECD program designers work closely with clients to be certain that all training supports the overall business goals as well as the corporate culture and values of the organization. Short and long-term evaluation is conducted to be certain that employees not only have learned the skills, but that those skills are applied effectively on the job. A strong workforce is the key to success in every organization.
WECD is committed to hiring trainers and facilitators that are not only academically credentialed, but also highly experienced in business situations. Professional workforce training staff evaluates and monitors the quality of all programs, whether proprietary, or brokered from one of the many partner training providers.
Benefits of Employer Services:
- Enables new businesses to be fully operational upon opening.
- Ensures a skilled workforce.
- Improves organizational productivity and performance.
- Promotes a competitive edge for emerging companies.
- Provides access to high-quality, experienced and credentialed instructors.
- Reduces the need for special training staff.
- Reduces time and research to identify and design effective training programs.
- Reduces the need for designated space and special equipment for training.
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