ACT Work Ready Communities
Do you remember taking the ACT college entrance exam? This Iowa-based organization does far more than those fill-in-the-bubble tests. They’re on the forefront of educational efforts to help people achieve education and workplace success. ACT has worked with Airtight for more than 10 years to design, develop and maintain numerous websites and web applications. Not only do our designers and developers work closely with their program leaders, our DevOps team has earned 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 Used on this Project
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- HTML / CSS / JavaScript
- PHP
- Amazon Web Services
- Laravel
- Vue
- MySQL
- APIs
Favorite Parts
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.
