7: Empowered Reentry and Essential Skills with Guest Tina Manus - a podcast by ACT Workforce

Guest Tina Manus took her experience as an educator and researcher to apply experiential problem-solving and interactive community building to build work readiness skills for individuals facing reentry from corrections.

The research, now referred to as the “Empowered Reentry Project,” was a 10-day program organized as a participatory action research project for nine returning citizens. The pilot program used essential skills assessment and its detailed score report, ACT® Tessera® Workforce, and the ACT® Tessera® Workforce Playbook respectively, as a pre- and post-test to measure skills identified by employers as necessary work ready skills.

Tina was inspired to conduct the initiative because she felt there was a gap in the strategy for the skill-building process for individuals facing reentry. The research question Tina worked to answer is “How would adding experiential problem solving and interactive community building activities increase access to workforce readiness skill building activities?” To ensure successful participation, Tina built credibility around the assessment, addressed academic barriers such as stamina and language, and leveraged existing relationships to motivate the individuals. ACT Tessera Workforce, a comprehensive and reliable essential skills assessment, turned out to be the missing link between social and emotional learning and workforce development for this population.

Listen to episode 7 to find out:

- What the participants learned about themselves

- How the assessment addressed essential skills, sometimes referred to as soft skills, objectively

- Implications for how to teach individuals to become better employees

- The outcomes and what’s next for the research

- The research behind the assessment from ACT Expert Jason Way

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