During the past 3 years, the NSSB has been developing a voluntary system of skill standards and assessment methods to improve the competitiveness of America's workforce. A subset of the NSSB, the MSSC was charged with developing skill standards for manufacturing industries.
The MSSC's standards cover six concentrations: production; quality assurance; logistics and inventory control; health, safety and environmental assurance; maintenance, installation and repair; and process development. The standards iden-tify best practices for successful manufacturing work and define the skills and knowledge required to perform that work.