The Arkansas Workforce Alliance for Growth in the Economy (WAGE™) program is designed to ensure that unemployed and under-employed Arkansans have the basic academic skills necessary to become employed and stay successful in the workplace. The program incorporates an alliance between:

Local Employer Advisory Committees
Adult Education Centers
Industrial Development Foundations
County and City Governments

These WAGE™ alliances work to identify and provide academic skills training essential to most entry-level jobs in their community and their region.

WAGE™ is Customer-Driven

In the world of business, a successful principle is that the process of providing goods and services should always be customer-driven. When your product meets the needs of a customer, the customer will consume your product. This principle works when preparing adults for the workplace.

An analogy can be made between the adult learner and a typical manufacturing process in the development of the workforce. The adult learner is treated as the product being developed to meet a customer's needs and the employer is the customer who consumes the product. Therefore, in order to develop a customer-driven product, the WAGE™ program places the employer at the center of an effort to define the essential skills needed to meet the customer's immediate needs.

Taken from WAGE start-up package- Adult Education Division-Arkansas Department of Career Education-revised 2016