ACT Work Ready Communities

While most people think automatically about the college entrance tests when they hear about ACT, this Iowa-based organization does far more than that. They're on the forefront of educational efforts to help people achieve education and workplace success. Airtight has worked with ACT for over a decade designing, developing and maintaining numerous websites and web applications, working closely with their program leaders and earning the trust of their IT department.

The challenge

ACT needed a central hub to administer its Work Communities, an ambitious program intended to bring employers and job seekers together for more prosperous communities. By identifying what communities have job seekers with in-demand skills, economic developers and site selectors can help employers satisfy their needs for labor. The entire ecosystem benefits when jobs are profiled and skills are identified with quantifiable standards monitored by ACT.

The solution

Airtight developed a web application that tracks the economic development activities of 3,243 counties and county equivalents in the United States. Data for each county includes achievement levels of job seekers in eight demographic groups, employer activity and overall progress towards established goals that must be met to achieve Certified Work Ready status. There's an interface for six distinct user classes, each with user-specific access to confidential data. The system sends dozens of transactional emails based on specific data events. Recently, the 11-year application was updated from CakePHP to Laravel and because we used efficient HTML and CSS, the site has been completely rebranded numerous times.

Technology we used

DevOps

Amazon Web Services

Backend

PHP

Laravel

MySQL

APIs

Frontend

HTML / CSS / JavaScript

Vue

Design

Adobe Creative Cloud

Our favorite part

The Work Ready website is constantly being updated, but one dataset gets a massive update each month. The data file includes 90 columns and 13,176 rows. Our application imports the data and performs tens of thousands of checks to see which states, territories, counties and county equivalents in the US have achieved their goals. After this import, the system sends hundreds of transactional emails to users, who are eager to log in and access their dashboards, which contain confidential information about their communities.

The system uses numerous APIs to gather and process data. For example, we use the Google Locations to retrieve information about more than 30,000 participating businesses. We use a document signing application and API to finalize agreements with participants.

ACT Work Ready Communities project screenshot

Let's talk.

Have an idea, project, or challenge you'd like to explore? We'd love to hear about it. Click below to get in touch and start the conversation.

Let's talk.

Have an idea, project, or challenge you'd like to explore? We'd love to hear about it. Click below to get in touch and start the conversation.

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