Hey, diploma. We’re giving your buddy the CIM early retirement. You up for his job?

Here’s the catch: We’re making that job harder.

After 17 years, state officials are giving up on both the CIM, which stands for certificate of initial mastery, and its partner document, the CAM, which stands for certificate of advanced mastery.

The two documents were meant to be proof that students knew and could do certain things by graduation, but lawmakers and educators agree that plan never worked. Colleges didn’t need them. Employers didn’t ask for them. High schools didn’t require either one for a diploma.

Both documents will go away this July, but lawmakers and educators still want graduates to prove they’ve acquired a range of knowledge and skills. So the Oregon Department of Education is giving new marching orders to its oldest ally: the diploma.

The plan is to toughen graduation standards statewide, a process already begun.

As of last year, graduating seniors must prove they’ve practiced skills such as teamwork and problem-solving and participated in a “career-related learning experience” along with passing their regular subjects.

Over the next few years, the state will add credit requirements to math, English and science, which means schools must retool schedules as early as this fall. By 2014, graduates also must either pass the state assessment tests or have met some other state-approved “proficiency level” before receiving a diploma.

Subjects are getting harder, too: By 2012, graduates must have experienced “scientific inquiry with lab experiences.” By 2014, the only accepted math credits will be Algebra I or above.

This time, state officials insist, they mean business. Show us you can do the job, or no diploma for you.

“Under the current system, you can graduate still with a D-minus and have no skills,” said Theresa Levy, education specialist in the state’s Department of Education Improvement and Innovation. Employers in particular are “really happy to know we’re going to have students graduating with the skills they’re looking for.”

That may depend on how seriously students take the requirements. Anissa Arthenayake, director of community education for OSU Federal Credit Union, works with high school interns but said her company hasn’t seen the increasing interest it hoped the new graduation standards would spur.

She’d like students to know that partnerships with businesses, and internships in particular, teach the importance of communicating clearly, staying on task, dressing appropriately and arriving on time.

“A lot of these kids get out and they’re just sort of sideswiped,” she said. “They haven’t been prepared.”

Trina Smith, promotions marketing director for Bicoastal Media, is among Albany employers who work with Josefine Fleetwood, the business-to-school liaison for Greater Albany Public Schools. Part of Fleetwood’s position involves helping students meet the career portion of the standards.

Smith organized internships for two South Albany High School students and a third from a high school in Dallas. The interns write commercials, plan events and help with on-location remote broadcasts, among other duties.

“I think it’s important for kids, especially nowadays, to get that work experience,” Smith said. “In school they learn the fundamentals, but if they’re interning, they’re going to be able to get a grasp of how it really works. We can only tell them so much in school.”

Sharayah Lehman, one of Smith’s interns, already filled her career standards with her summer job but appreciates the extra experience. She won’t face the tougher credit standards but says she likes to tease her brothers, a sophomore and a seventh-grader, about them.

“I joke with them every so often, ‘You have to do more than I did!’” the 18-year-old said. But she thinks requirements should get tougher as the complexity of the world increases.

“The world keeps moving,” she said.

West Albany senior Logan Blair agrees.

“Right now, graduation requirements are really, really lax,” said the 17-year-old, who said he knows at least one graduate who filled out his senior year with four PE classes. “The required amount of classes you’ve got to take to graduate is just ridiculously low.”

Two years of science isn’t enough, agreed his AP biology teacher, Shana Hains. But she questions whether the state will support what it takes to teach more labwork, as will be required for the class of 2012.

Experiments can’t be done effectively in classrooms of 35 students, she said. Populations will have to shrink and budgets expand to cover pricey equipment. In addition, schools will have to either increase instruction time or concede that something has to give.

“Labs take time,” Hains said. “That takes time away from this broad curriculum that they expect us to teach for ‘the test’.”

Resources are a concern every time the state tweaks student achievement goals, said Mike Strowbridge, director of curriculum for the Corvallis School District. He said he hopes the support will be given to make the new standards work, whether that involves providing more access to technology, time for staff development or funding for counselors.

On the whole, however, he and Assistant Superintendent Jim Hogeboom applaud the state’s move.

“It was pretty smart,” Strowbridge said, “to realize it wasn’t working the way it was intended and to say, ‘Let’s try something else.’”