Floyd County could become Northwest Georgia’s next Work Ready Community soon.

Georgia Northwestern Technical College Vice President Pete McDonald told the Seven Hills Rotary Club on Tuesday that Pirelli should put the community over the top in terms of work ready certificates to its employees.

Rich Hammond, who has directed the Auto Alley Work Ready Initiative for 13 counties across the region, said those industries, “need a higher skilled workforce, period.”

The Work Ready program is set up across seven regions of the state with each region focusing on different sectors of the economy.

Hammond said that with Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes in Alabama, Saturn, and Nissan and soon to be Volkswagen in Tennessee, BMW in South Carolina and now Kia in Georgia, that the Coosa Valley region is ideally situated to be a supplier to those assembly plants.

The primary goals of the Work Ready program are to increase high school graduation rates and get work-ready certificates to a large percentage of the workforce. The school systems in Rome and Floyd County have exceeded the 70 percent graduation rate goals. The city of Rome reported a 73.1 percent graduation rate this past year and Floyd County registered a 78.1 percent rate. Hammond told the Rotarians, “We need to set our bar very high, anything beyond a 10 percent dropout ratio is unsatisfactory.”

Work Ready certificates are issued to employees who have passed an ACT-based three and a half hour test that is focused on skills including math, reading and job specific information.

Individual industries participate in the program in a number of ways, including the development of Work Ready profiles for specific jobs in their company. F&P Georgia, Bekaert and Pirelli have taken the lead in developing those profiles in Rome and Floyd County.

Hammond said a survey of industries across the 13-county region indicated that less than 20 percent anticipated any significant hiring this

year. Job skills most in demand according to that survey included industrial main­tenance and robotic PLC automation technicians, which Hammond said were worth their weight in gold.

Hammond said that industries also expressed need for basic production workers with good work habits, welder/die technicians and first line supervisors.

Only three counties in Northwest Georgia are presently designated as Work Ready communities — Chattooga, Catoosa and Bartow.