What is Ready for Life?
Ready for Life is an innovative career guidance platform to ensure every Arkansan can reach their full economic potential. Ready for Life is for any individual across the state who is looking to elevate their career, and the platform is entirely free to use.
Who has access?
Anybody in the state of Arkansas can use Ready for Life!
What resources are available on the site?
When you go to the home page of Ready for Life, you will see 6 options to help you navigate the platform. Those options are:
- Update Your Career Passport
- The Career Passport is one, organized page that has your resume, skills, education, work experience, and certifications all in the same place. It’s important to keep it consistently updated.
- Explore Careers
- Sort through thousands of potential careers, by your skill set or desired salary, and learn more about each one and the path you need to take to get there.
- Find Learning
- Once you have found a career path, the AI component of Ready for Life will suggest trainings and courses that you can take to boost your skills, specifically in your desired career.
- Apply to Work
- You can find thousands of open positions that you can apply for on the Apply to Work page. Look at some jobs, then click “Apply” to be taken to an external link to apply for the job, or you can save the job for a later application.
- Navigate Your Roadmap
- Your roadmap takes you through a step-by-step process of how to find a new career, get personalized learning recommendations, access resources and supports for that new career, and then how to apply for jobs in that field in your area.
- Find Resources
- External links to helpful resources in Arkansas, language development, family and childcare resources, Medicaid, and other community support resources.
How can you take trainings?
Taking training courses is a great way to learn and develop new skills! Not only does this demonstrate to employers that you are motivated to reach your career goals, but it also allows you to gain confidence in different skills required for your career path. Ready For Life partners with learning providers to create a comprehensive catalog of learning opportunities spanning diverse industries. Once you determine your career path, Ready for Life’s artificial intelligence will provide personalized course recommendations.
You can navigate to the Learning page at any time from your side menu by clicking “Learning” or from the Home page by clicking “Find Learning”. From the Learning page, you can type in a course, skill, or keyword into the search bar to see relevant results. You can also filter based on course delivery (online or in person) or cost.
- Browse Learning – find trainings based on your skill set or recommended trainings for your career path, and sort them by free, paid, or hybrid courses. The vast majority of the courses on Ready For Life are free!
- My Learning – once you have taken a course or saved a course to take a later date, you can return to that learning transcript by going to My Learning.
What is the Career Passport?
My Career Passport provides you with a view of all you have accomplished in your career, and helps you stay organized and up to date on your skills development and marketability. It’s one, organized page that has your resume, skills, education, work experience, and certifications all in the same place. As you gain new skills, experiences, and perspectives, it’s great to get into a habit of updating your resume and other job search tools so you are ready for whatever opportunity comes your way.
What is the Career Path?
Having a clear career focus makes it easier to reach your goals, which is why selecting a career path to pursue is a primary step in Your Roadmap. Once you’ve determined your career direction, all learning and job recommendations will update to keep you progressing towards your career target.
You can navigate to the Careers page at any time from your side menu by clicking “Careers” or from the Home page by clicking “Explore Careers”.
A key component to making the right career selection is doing some basic career exploration. From the Careers page, high match careers will automatically be recommended based on your skills. The match score is displayed to the left of each career recommendation and will give you a quick view of your overlapping skills based on the skills you’ve included in your profile.
You can also explore and research different career paths by:
- Typing a job title or keyword into the search bar and clicking the magnifying glass. This will populate relevant results as well as provide advanced filters with Industry, Demand, Average Salary, Experience, and Interest Traits criteria that you can select from to narrow results.
- Filtering careers by Skills score, Demand or Salary
Once you know your career direction, you can select to pursue that career path by clicking “Select career path”. Once clicked, a pop-up box will appear asking you to Confirm your choice. Once you’ve confirmed your career path, all Learning, Resources, and Work recommendations will be updated to support you on that pathway.
Your new career and learning recommendations are informed by your skills gap, which measures the skills you don’t yet have that are also relevant for your selected career.
If you’ve already selected a career path but decide you want to pursue something else, that’s totally ok! Afterall, making the right career selection is challenging and sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error. Just click “Select career path” on any career as you continue to browse, and this will update your recommendations accordingly.
Ready For Life uses artificial intelligence to provide personalized recommendations of learning opportunities, resources, and job postings to help you navigate your career transition. Once you’ve locked in a career path selection, top Learning opportunities and Job postings will update on your Career page.