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o, What Are the Skills Needed for Work Readiness? Determining the necessary skills for successful performance of specific job duties is the focus of a large body of research in industrial and organizational psychology. This research targets identifying a combination of factors (skills, abilities, personal characteristics) that best predict an individual's ability to perform successfully on the job. The literature overwhelmingly provides support that measures of foundational cognitive skills, or general cognitive ability, are the best predictors of on- the -job performance 4° It is also generally accepted that noncognitive behaviors, or soft skills, add accuracy to performance prediction," For example, personality measures have been shown to increase the predictive ,power by 18 %, and integrity tests by 27 %, over cognitive assessments alone." Soft skills are defined as personal characteristics and behavioral skills that enhance an individual's interactions, job performance, and career prospects across a broad range of settings. Examples of soft skills include adaptability, communication skills, cooperation, discipline, and integrity. The value of measuring soft skills in determining work readiness has also been addressed via national employer surveys, which reveal that soft skills are highly valued by employers and are often found to be lacking in entry -level workers .13 Work Readiness Standards and Benchmarks Work readiness standards are precise descriptions of the knowledge and combination of skills that individuals need to be minimally qualified for a target occupation and are determined by the level of skills profiled for a national representative sample of jobs in a given occupation. Imagine that skill combinations can he shown by a bar graph that contains different heights for each skill level, If an occupation requires a combination of eight unique skills with varying levels from 1 -5 for each skill, that would equal 390,625 different skill signatures. This allows us to more precisely measure skills gaps between individual skill signatures and the skill standards that employers require. To demonstrate how work readiness standards are derived, we will examine two occupations as identified in O'NET. First, we identify the tasks that are important for an occupation such as an accountant, followed by those that are important for a welder. ACT F -2 Page 100