What are Skill Standards?
Why Use Skill Standards?
Building a Foundation for Tomorrow: Skill Standards for Information Technology, is a cooperative effort of the NorthWest Center for Emerging Technologies (NWCET), the Regional Advanced Technology Education Consortium (RATEC), the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, the Washington Software and Digital Media Alliance (WSDMA), and the Society for Information Management (SIM).
The goal of this Advanced Technology Education (ATE) project was to identify voluntary skill standards that reflect industry expectations in information technology career clusters and which can be used to:
- Improve the education of the information technology workforce.
- Increase the cooperation between education and business.
- Improve academic mobility by developing articulated curriculum that continues from high school through the community and technical colleges and on to four-year institutions.
- Establish criteria and standards for model technology degrees.
Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Major industry support was provided by The Boeing Company, Microsoft, PACCAR, and other leading technology companies in the Pacific Northwest.
What Are Skill Standards?
Voluntary skill standards establish the agreed-upon, industry-identified knowledge, skills, and abilities required to succeed in the workplace. Skill standards provide benchmarks of skill and performance attainment that are behavioral and measurable. Skill standards answer two critical questions:
- What do workers need to know and be able to do to succeed in today's workplace?
- How do we know when workers are performing well?
Without this fundamental information, employers do not know who to hire or how to evaluate employees, employees and new entrants to the workforce do not know what is expected of them, and educators do not know how to prepare students for the challenges of the workplace.