VIDALIA — Concordia Economic Development is looking to partner with the company known for testing students’ college preparedness to test the parish’s work readiness.

CED Executive Director Heather Malone will present the Concordia Parish Police Jury this evening with a request to apply for Concordia Parish to be a Work Ready Certified Community through ACT Inc., the same company that prepares the ACT pre-college test.

ACT has a job skills assessment test known as WorkKeys, and if enough employers in an area sign on and have their employees assessed, the community can be certified as Work Ready, Malone said.

In addition to having businesses assess their employees, work ready communities also have a certain number of unemployed, underemployed and students assessed through the test to get a representative sample of the population.

“Industrial site selectors are beginning to look at Work Ready communities when they look for their work force,” Malone said. “With this designation, they will know what our work force looks like and that we have a skilled work force.”

Concordia Economic development likewise wants to do an overall assessment of where the community’s current skills are in comparison to the job opportunities offered in the area, Malone said.

“We want to look at this from a standpoint of three, five and 10 years on, and what jobs we anticipate coming into the area based on industrial announcements that have been made,” she said.

“We can go in, based on what those needs are for that job profile, and if our workers don’t meet our needs, we look at what training is available to get us to where we need to be, workforce-wise.”

Some local businesses already use WorkKeys, Malone said, and the coalition seeking the Work Ready designation will include representatives from economic development bodies, private business and the local school system.

The application for Work Ready designation includes having government sponsors, and the City of Vidalia gave its support at its board of aldermen meeting last week.

“You can take this and highlight your weaknesses and strengths, and from there you can capitalize on that knowledge,” Vidalia Mayor Hyram Copeland said.

The assessment includes testing in applied math, locating for information and reading for information, Malone said.

“There’s also a fourth component we are wanting to include, a soft skills assessment,” she said. “We realized that our workforce lacks in the soft skills area, and we feel this is something we can offer a high school student to assess them and help them move forward from there.”

Soft skills include knowledge of how to present oneself in a job setting or how to answer a phone, Malone said.

Some funding remains from previous programs CED has done, and so the application can be completed at little or no extra cost to taxpayers, she said.