TCTC Testing Center Serves Business Needs
WARREN, Ohio – Economic and workforce development leaders Tuesday touted Trumbull Career & Technical Center’s designation as an official adult testing center as a tool to help area businesses and to attract new companies to the Mahoning Valley. The Champion Township educational center is now one of 11 schools certified as part of the University System of Ohio Talent Development Network.
As part of the network, TCTC will be able to provide hundreds of fests for individuals and businesses and industry “to use to grow the economy,” said Vicki Thompson, adult education director. Those tests include assessments and certifications in a wide range of technical areas as well as background and drug tests, she said.
“It allows current businesses to save time and money because they can have one place where they can go for a gamut and a variety of testing that they need,” Thompson said. The testing can be customized and bundled, and can be done at TCTC or at the work site. For individuals, the network provides an opportunity to site for “a variety of skill-based assessments so they can have a credential to show an employer and be gainfully employed in our local economy,” she added.
Association with the network will provide TCTC with “the best job-matching services for our students and employers,” said Dora Zandarski, testing center administrator.
“With access to this network, our students will be better able to take charge of their own job and career direction,” Zandarski said. “The key to the USO Talent Development Network is identifying skill levels and preferences to match the right person with the right job and then developing them to their highest potential in the job.”
Being part of the network also enables TCTC to “bring together many of the world’s premiere assessments” and provides it with access to numerous assessment and certification vendors, she added.
Those include Performance Assessment Network, or Pan, which works with leading test publishers in categories such as information technology, mechanical and technical, and career exploration; Pearson Vue, which has developed diagnostic and selection tests and performance assessments for operators, technicians and maintenance groups; and Ramsey, which will allow TCTC to offer the General Educational Development, or GED, test online and more than 500 IT certifications including Cisco, Computing Technology Testing Association (CompTIA), IBM, Novell and CareerScope.
“What we really should be calling this is a matchmaker or a success program because that’s really what this does,” commented state Rep. Tom Letson, D-64 Warren. “This type of program is to show people a pathway to success.”
TCTC already administers testing for clients including Ohio Star Forge in Champion and Starr Manufacturing in Vienna Township. The assessments and certifications TCTC will offer though the network will be valuable for area businesses, said Dale Foerster, vice president of Starr Manufacturing and of the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition.
“All of us are in a position where we’re competing for the same talent and the same skills, and it is very difficult to find the skills we need to do the complicated kinds of manufacturing we have today,” she remarked. Rather than button-pushing and rote “doing the same thing all the time,” workers need to have skills such as geometry, trigonometry and algebra and “all kinds of skills,” Foerster said.
“They have to be computer savvy. They need to be able to think out of the box. They need to be able to adapt to situations, and for that we need certain aptitudes and certain kinds of training,” Foerster said.
The Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber is “excited to have another tool in our toolbox of economic development services,” said Sarah Boyarko, the chamber’s vice president of economic development, business retention and expansion. That TCTC is one of only 11 such multivendor test centers in the state “speaks volumes about the organization” and its employees, she added.
“Companies coming to the area want to know about the workforce. It’s a huge concern that they have quality skilled individuals,” and the growth of the oil and gas industry has only increased that need, Boyarko said. As an official test center for the state talent development network, TCTC will be able to create customized services to save a company time and money, both of which are important, she said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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