At 1EdTech’s 2025 Digital Credentials Summit in Phoenix, Arizona it was data, flow chart and taxonomy galore. For me, a few numbers from the opening keynote set the stage for the week:
65% of a person’s job will change every 5-7 years. If you follow Getting Smart regularly, this isn’t surprising, but the framing of permanent and cyclical change made this statistic even more profound. This number was shared in a keynote from BrandEd CEO Brandon Busteed. He then asked us to imagine how this impacts the work week, shifting from a 5-day work week to a 4+1 workweek where employees have four days for working and one day for learning/skilling. In a workplace that moves this quickly, adaptability, agency and curiosity are more important than ever.
25% of online college enrollments (WGU, SNHU, etc) are students supported by employer benefits. A dramatic number of higher ed enrollment is going to college on the dime of their employer (i.e Starbucks and Amazon employer benefits programs). This matters because it implies two dramatic shifts in how people think about higher education and labor:
- This strategy is valuable for retention and pipeline development and 67% of employees took this opportunity to learn new skills.
- People used to go to college to get a job, now they are going to college to get a better job.
18-24 year olds are “the least working generation in history. This stat was thrown out in a keynote and caught me off guard. I was able to find some supporting data here: “The percentage of 15-17 year-olds who reported working in any fashion in the prior year has dropped from 48% in 1968 to a mere 19% in 2018. And the percentage of 18-21 year-olds reporting working in the prior year has dropped from 80% in 1968 to 58% in 2018.”
These datapoints add up to dramatic shifts for the workforce and, most critically, dramatic shifts for how people navigate the job market. This is the challenge that credentials are trying to solve. They aim to be a signal of what someone knows and can do and provide a higher resolution picture of a candidate for employment. According to the latest report from 1EdTech “A report from HolonIQ and the American Council on Education found 81% of employers think they should look at skills rather than degrees when hiring, and 95% of university leaders said they expected microcredentials to be integrated into most degree programs in the future. In addition, states are taking active steps toward skills-based hiring and even replacing A-F grades with a “mastery report card” and a 2023 report found 59 state-led initiatives to expand microcredential programs in 28 states.” One of these initiatives is in Idaho which had a 34% increase in earned badges last year through their SkillStack program.
Despite this optimistic outlook for credentials and badging, only 15% of HR Professionals say they can hire skills credentials, partially due to recruitment technology adoption and partially due to not having enough validity. To put a cherry on top, as we outlined in our 2024 report Expanding Access, Value and Experiences through Credentials, there is limited dialogue happening between K-12, higher education and employers in the credentialing space. The Digital Credentials Summit was an exception to this siloing of industry. Here are a few things I’ll be taking with me after a few days in Phoenix.
Standards Are Critical For Interoperability
One of the most crucial parts of the conversation at the summit had to do with data structuring, basically ensuring that information is entered so that both machines and humans can read it. This structured data helps keep credentials interoperable, transparent and, thereby, useful.
The 1EdTech team has helped to create standards around this data structuring to ensure a high-functioning open marketplace for folks to pilot, test and iterate. Open Badges 3.0, the new data standard for badging, provides rich metadata layers, ensuring that a badge houses skills data, context data, temporal data and more:
- Criteria
- Description
- Alignment
- Evidence
- Skills
- Recipient
- Issuer
- Issue date
- Expiration date
- Electronically signed
In addition, they continue to gather standards for CASE, an open source and machine readable standards format for competencies, syllabuses, and more. The CASE Network is where folks can upload all of these machine-readable standards to borrow, repurpose and communicate.
Additionally, they just launched the Comprehensive Learner Record 2.0, a new standard creating, sharing, and verifying digital records of individual achievements. This standard supports a wide array of accomplishments, including academic courses, competencies, skills, and workplace milestones.
This past fall, IEEE, the world’s largest association of technical professionals with more than 423,000 members in over 160 countries around the world, published a new global standard for Learning and Employment Records (LERs).
All of these efforts support a growing movement toward data interoperability, and they aren’t at it alone. At the federal level, the Department of Homeland Security has launched two websites CanIVC.com and VCplayground.org, which can assess the interoperability of your data.
Lots of Players and Everyone’s Invited
Building an LER ecosystem is an ambitious and challenging effort. A recent report from SmartResume documents the many players that exist in each of the necessary components.
In addition, it makes the following predictions:
- The Comprehensive Learner Record will gain traction in K-12 education, empowering educators to deliver personalized learning and creating connective tissue to employment and postsecondary education opportunities
- Employer struggles with AI-generated resumes at scale will drive early investments in LER adoption by a few innovative employers and HR systems
- The Learning and Employment Record-Resume Standard will launch across the LER-Ecosystem, driving interoperability between public and private LER platforms to new heights
Taxonomy Mapping
Numerous organizations are working to aggregate skills taxonomies and use them as a valuable training set for large language models. By doing this, they are better able to extract skills from uploaded documents and artifacts like resumes, service records, etc.
Leveraging AI for Skills Extraction and Research (LAiSER) is a project from George Washington University that enables skill extraction and successive mapping to see where skills may or may not overlap. For example, clustering skills derived from hundreds of syllabi on multiple axes shows that data science and AI skills are much closer linked than computer science and AI skills, enabling instructors to make adjustments based on workforce demands, student body preferences, etc. These are “task-level granular skills.”
SkillsAware, another skills extraction tool, takes a look at submitted data like a resume, badges, etc. and extracts skills from the experience, applying a confidence rating based on whether or not the submitted data has been verified or self-asserted, the quality of the submitted materials, etc.
Skills Validation Network has published tons of great research on the current landscape of skills validation. They define skills validation as: “The process by which an assertion (“I assert that I have a skill!”) is substantiated:
- Typically conducted by a qualified 3rd party
- Creates trust that the individual possesses a skill
- Based on a shared understanding of the meaning of a skill
- Indicates level and context of a skill
- Can be conducted through various methods”
SHRM Foundation, in partnership with Education Design Lab, JFF, and many other,s are developing a Center for a Skills First Future, to launch later this year.
Standout Examples
One of the core six recommendations from the 1EdTech report is “start small”, something that many of the higher ed institutions were modeling through launching discreet credentialing efforts to small groups of students.
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) offers over 150 microcredentials in collaboration with more than 30 campus partners, including academic programs, student affairs, and career services. These microcredentials are in the following categories:
- Engagement Microcredentials: Recognize participation in specific tasks or events. This structure ensures our microcredentials align with both learning outcomes and skill development.
- Knowledge Microcredentials: Build on prior knowledge and introduce new concepts or practices.
- Proficiency Microcredentials: Demonstrate the acquisition of a transferable skill applicable in various contexts.
- Mastery Microcredentials: Represent advanced expertise in a specialized topic, often requiring significant time and effort, equivalent to a 3-credit course.
- Meta Microcredentials: Symbolize the completion of a learning pathway, comprising at least two prerequisite microcredentials from the Knowledge, Proficiency, or Mastery levels.
In 2020, Western Governors University (WGU) and Open Skills Network created Rich Skill Descriptors (RSDs), a universal language for describing skills. By 2024, WGU’s Skills Library held over 20,000 RSDs, developed with industry input. Along the way, WGU has awarded thousands of credentials and developed a Unified Credential Framework which is a clearly articulated criteria and taxonomy protocol. Currently offering 50+ microcredentials, WGU is expanding their efforts into offering a credential achieved for finishing a course to better support stopouts, and ensuring that learners are getting value all along their degree pathway.
SkillsFWD is an initiative to pilot and drive credentials in multiple regions. The following descriptions of the various efforts are found on their site.
- Accelerate Montana’s Validated Skills, led by Accelerate Montana, is a pilot of statewide adoption of LERs among employers of all sizes in the construction trades and technology industries across urban, rural, and tribal communities.
- Alabama Talent Triad is an effort to leverage Alabama’s comprehensive skills-based talent marketplace — which uses the lifecycle of LERs to connect job-seekers to employment and education opportunities — to scale state-wide pathways from entry credentials to middle skills jobs across four industries.
- Central Ohio Talent Network, led by ASPYR, powers new modes of early career talent and employer matching at scale via LERs that leverages a work-based learning solution powered by SchooLinks, a market-leading college and career readiness platform.
- ColoradoFWD, led by the Colorado Workforce Development Council, addresses urgent direct care and behavioral healthcare talent shortages by using LERs to efficiently match skills and talent to opportunity, promote economic mobility, and empower learners and earners.
- Student Worker Employment for Skills-Based Success, led by Arizona State University, empowers students seeking work to gain meaningful student employment through a scalable LER-driven job marketplace while reducing barriers to hiring for employers.
- Scaling a Statewide LER Ecosystem in Indiana to Advance Skills-Based Hiring and Economic Mobility for All Hoosiers, led by Western Governors University, will help determine how to sustain and scale a comprehensive LER ecosystem that provides the human capital needed to drive a robust, forward-leaning economy through public-private partnerships.
- Pittsburgh Regional Upskilling Alliance’s LER Initiative, led by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), aims to create an end-to-end LER solution that connects the learner journey from initial engagement through credential attainment to fulfilling employment and bridges the gap between talent and employers in the region.
What does all of this mean?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of initiatives across the country exploring what’s possible in credentialing, skills articulation and data interoperability. In each of these efforts, portability is paramount, evidence is everything and verification/validation is … varied. Here are my three high-level takeaways:
- After attending this summit, it has become clear that the technology is going to be LER ecosystem ready faster than we are, but gathering varied stakeholders to chart a path forward will continue to be the next best step.
- With AI growth, millions of available credentials, and a bevy of approaches to validation, it’s more important than ever to support learners in collecting and documenting rich evidence from their learning experiences, while also connecting them to mentors and industry leaders who can vouch for their applied skills.
- K-12 needs to catch up in this space. Very few secondary schools are investing in LER initiatives, yet these initiatives would increase access and value for every student.
- We get the chance to look at a lot of learner outcome frameworks. Adaptability, agency and curiosity need to show up on a heck of a lot more of them.
The post What’s the Status of Credentials? Digital Credentials Summit 2025 appeared first on Getting Smart.
Explore the future of credentials at the Digital Credentials Summit 2025, focusing on skills, interoperability, and workforce adaptability.
The post What’s the Status of Credentials? Digital Credentials Summit 2025 appeared first on Getting Smart. Leadership, New Pathways, The Future of Tech and Work, accelerated pathways, Competency-Based Education, credentials, EdTech Getting Smart
