Tallo Celebrates Career Technical Education Month Alongside New Partner, the CTECS

Just in time for Career Technical Education Month, Tallo, a digital platform that connects talent with opportunities, announced it is joining forces with the Career and Technical Education Consortium of States (CTECS), through which members develop competency-based career and technical education resources validated by business, industry, and labor.

CTECS creates custom assessments and services for students that are designed to help meet the skills needs of individual CTECS members and business partners. Through Tallo, students can showcase their unique abilities in order to make meaningful career connections with the more than 700 companies, colleges, and organizations on the platform.

“Tallo provides CTECS the opportunity to offer a systematic and sustainable talent pipeline where students can showcase their ongoing technical and workplace readiness skills from middle school career interest development and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) through high school and adult education credentialing,” said Ken Potthoff, Deputy Director of CTECS.

Through this new partnership, students will be able to take a “Workplace Readiness Skills” (WRS) test, and if they pass, add a WRS Digital Badge to their Tallo profile. This Badge will show potential employers they’ve successfully completed a nationally-recognized assessment backed by research from the University of Virginia, Weldon Cooper Center, and business and industry, proving their competency in more than 20 employability skills, including critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork, respect for diversity, and more.

“The CTECS Workplace Readiness Skills (WRS) credential package, which culminates in a WRS Badge, ensures they are aware of and prepared for the real-world challenges of their professions,” Potthoff continued. “The WRS is the best test available to measure a student’s awareness of essential workplace expectations across the full spectrum of careers."

CTECS’ other assessments target specific areas, from aerospace and welding to energy and accounting. Member states and partners for which they design these assessments – Nevada, Idaho, South Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, and Apprenticeship programs – will be particularly interested in the newfound ability to search for Tallo users with WRS badges and easily connect with top tier talent.

“Students adding the Workplace Readiness Skills badge to their professional Tallo profile today will have a leg up on their peers tomorrow,” said Casey Welch, CEO and Co-founder of Tallo. “The nation’s skills gap presents a challenge to industry, but an opportunity for students, and Tallo is honored to help students prepare to seize it in partnership with incredible organizations like CTECS.”

For more information about how students and educators can get started, please visit: tallo.com/ctecs. For more information about the skills addressed on the WRS assessment, visit: https://wrs.ctecs.org/practice/.

For more information on the CTECS Middle School Career Interest Development distance-learning course, visit: https://wrs.ctecs.org/mscareerinterestdev/.

About Tallo:

Tallo’s virtual workforce platform provides a means for talent and talent seekers to overcome traditional geographic and socioeconomic boundaries and assists in the development, retention, reskilling, and attraction of talent. Tallo provides the only end to end workforce talent solution based on an approach of combining science, data analytics, and digital technology. Over one million Tallo users showcase their skills and accomplishments, connect with post-secondary institutions and companies, and have access to customized career pathways and financial assistance guidance. Tallo users represent more than 27,000 high schools, 4,000 colleges, hundreds of companies, and governmental entities. Tallo also serves a diverse community of users, including 300,000+ Black and Latinx/Hispanic students and young professionals. For more information about Tallo, visit www.tallo.com.

About the Career and Technical Education Consortium of States:

CTECS boasts nearly a fifty year history of operating a consortium of states for which members pool efforts to develop competency-based career and technical education resources that are validated by business, industry, and labor. CTECS has worked with 45 states along with organizations such as the United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC), the Florida Automobile Dealers Association (FADA), and the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) to find connections between partners and members of the consortium and encourages the exchange of knowledge and resources collaboratively. CTECS successfully facilitates a complete occupational analysis system whereby data is collected from incumbent workers for the specified occupational area. This creates a vast repository of assessment and training tools that are readily available to new community members. But our true competitive advantage is established by our ability to customize assessments and services to meet individual member and partner needs. For more information, visit www.ctecs.org. To get started with CTECS today, connect here: https://wrs.ctecs.org/ctecs-middle-school-course-interest/;https://wrs.ctecs.org/ctecs-wrs-ccra-interest-and-follow-up-request/

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