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Third Way
Hurdles to Connected Credentials
Takeaways
Over the course of their careers, workers will need to continually
upgrade their skills as jobs change. Right now, however, the
postsecondary credentialing system is completely fragmented, making it
difficult for workers to gain new skills and credentials. In this
report, we examine two central hurdles to a connected credentialing
system and their root causes:
Credentials don’t provide the right information for people who need to
evaluate and compare them. That’s because there is no common way to
describe and understand the DNA of any given credential.
Credentialing records are fragmented and students don’t own enough of
their data. That’s because there is no widely-used digital
infrastructure to easily store, share, and display credentials.
These hurdles affect people trying to apply for jobs, enroll in job
training programs, and upgrade their skills throughout their lives.
They make it difficult for employers to understand what skills job
applicants actually have. Ultimately, they make it harder for people to
access economic opportunity in the face of job disruption.
Ten years. Because of how fast our economy is evolving, a person’s
skills stay relevant for just a decade.1 That means high school
graduates who plan to work until 65 will have to learn new skills and
earn new credentials at least four times throughout their lives as
workplaces and job duties change. As workers change jobs, enter new
industries, and seek new opportunities, they will need access to
different education and training programs and will need to have
learning experiences build on one another throughout their lives.
If that wasn’t challenging enough, workers have to navigate a
postsecondary credentialing system that is completely fragmented. There
is not enough linking the various sources of education people tap into
after high school, such as military training, courses at schools or
online, on-the-job training, and skills learned in prison, among
others. This makes it difficult for people to share their credentials
with prospective employers, have confidence in the value of those
credentials, and connect credentials earned throughout life as they
pursue further education or move up a career ladder. In this report, we
unpack what this fragmentation looks like, why it exists, and how it
impacts credential attainment, lifelong learning, and economic
opportunity.
Problem #1: Credentials don’t provide the right information for people who need to evaluate and compare them.
There are over 300,000 credentials available in the United States,
ranging from digital badges to bachelor’s degrees and advanced
degrees.2 Yet, the proliferation of credentials has caused widespread
confusion about their quality. Employers, training institutions, and
learners currently don’t get enough information on the DNA of a
credential—that is, the competencies the credential-holder can be
expected to have. For example, when employers and postsecondary
institutions look at an individual’s resume, they may understand that a
person has a particular credential but may not fully understand what it
means that the person has that credential. They may not know what
skills the credential-holder is supposed to have, whether the person
has actually learned those skills, and how different credentials
compare to one another.
Learners who want to get new skills may not know which credential is
best for their career goals or how to assess the value of a particular
credential. For example, many institutions offer one-year certificates
in dental hygiene, but there are also programs that offer two-year
associate’s degrees in dental hygiene, and it can be difficult to
understand the difference between these credentials.3
This opacity has very real-world consequences. It makes it difficult
for employers to compare different job applicants. It makes it tougher
for adult learners to get credit for prior learning when they pursue
further education and training. And it makes it difficult for people to
decide which education and training program is best for them to upgrade
their skills or learn new ones, or determine which programs provide a
return on investment and which ones don’t.
Ultimately, when credentials don’t provide enough information, it makes
it difficult to shift to an education and training system that is based
on a person’s skills. This, in turn, has massive implications for
economic opportunity. For example, employers have in recent years
requested bachelor’s degrees for jobs that previously required less
time-intensive credentials. In some cases this is because job duties
have changed, but in other cases, employers use bachelor attainment as
an indicator of skill attainment.4 This degree inflation has become
widespread, with 6 million jobs currently at risk.5 Degree inflation
shuts out the 2/3 of Americans who don’t have bachelor’s degrees,
including those with relevant skills and sub-bachelor or non-degree
credentials. Sixty percent of employers reject qualified candidates
with relevant skills and experience in favor of recent college
graduates—even though many employers find middle-skill workers to be
just as productive as college graduates.6
If employers could screen job candidates based on credentials that
provided more information on skills and proof of learning, they may be
more comfortable hiring people with a broader array of credentials,
including but not limited to bachelor’s degrees. Make no
mistake—bachelor’s degrees have value, and degree-holders tend to have
higher earnings growth over their lifetimes. But not all jobs call for
a bachelor’s degree, and too many workers with other types of
credentials and relevant skills are being shut out of job opportunities
simply because they don’t have one.
Why don’t credentials provide this needed information?
Currently, there is no common way to describe and understand the DNA of
a credential. That is, there is no standard language to describe any
given credential based on what competencies the credential-holder can
be expected to have and, by extension, what job tasks a worker can be
expected to do. This makes it difficult to compare and evaluate
different credentials and the people holding them, such as a
certificate in dental hygiene versus an associate’s degree in dental
hygiene.
However, there are nascent efforts to change this, with many
organizations developing “competency frameworks.” At a broad level, a
competency framework is a way of breaking down a credential or an
occupation into the specific skills, knowledge, and abilities that the
credential-holder should have or that the occupation requires. For
example, Lumina Foundation’s Connecting Credentials Framework can be
used to describe, understand, and compare any given credential based on
the knowledge and skills that the credential-holder should have—that
is, what the person should know and what the person should be able to
do in applying that knowledge.7
There are over 1,000 competency frameworks, including frameworks for
specific industries like manufacturing. Each framework can be thought
of as its own language. This is just one example of how credential data
is expressed differently throughout the credentialing ecosystem
depending on which language an organization uses. The T3 Innovation
Network, launched in 2018 by the US Chamber of Commerce and Lumina
Foundation, is working to harmonize data standards so different
competency languages can be interoperable. The goal is to produce a
common way of describing credential data so it can be easily shared,
understood, and compared throughout the credentialing ecosystem. These
efforts are currently in pilot project stages.8
The T3 Innovation Network brings together employers, training
providers, technical standards organizations, technology vendors, and
other stakeholders in the credentialing ecosystem. The Network aims to
explore how emerging technologies like blockchain and artificial
intelligence can be used to create a public-private data and technology
infrastructure. This infrastructure will, in turn, facilitate a more
transparent and connected credentialing ecosystem in which employers
can signal their skill needs, learners can signal the skills they have,
and training providers can signal the skills they teach. In 2018, the
T3 Network identified specific areas of the credentialing ecosystem
where stakeholders could bring emerging technologies to bear on
existing challenges. In 2019, the T3 Network began implementing pilot
projects in those areas.9
Problem #2: Credentialing records are fragmented and students don’t own enough of their data.
Many people use a financial institution that links a checking account,
savings account, and credit card together—all seamlessly accessible
through online banking. This helps consumers get a full picture of
their financial situation in one easy-to-read snapshot. If only a
person’s learning records were that connected. Instead, records of a
person’s learning experiences reside separately at multiple
institutions. A person’s digital badges exist separately from his or
her college diploma, which is separate from online classes,
co-curricular activities, employer-sponsored training, or courses taken
in other venues—from the military to prison. This means there isn’t one
comprehensive picture of a person’s learning experiences that the
person can easily share with prospective employers or education and
training institutions. Instead, the burden is on learners to gather
their records, compile them, and share them with prospective employers
or institutions. Obtaining those records can be costly and require
people to jump through bureaucratic hurdles, like finding a transcript
request form, filling it out, and sending it to a college registrar.
It doesn’t help that credentials are stuck in the era of fax machines.
Upon completing a postsecondary program, a graduate receives a paper
credential instead of a digital one that could be easily shared online
and provide richer information (such as links to e-portfolios that show
proof of learning). The traditional resume and transcript provide
information on the postsecondary programs a person has enrolled in and
the credentials they have earned, but they provide limited information
on the competencies those programs are supposed to teach and limited
evidence that a person has actually mastered those competencies,
because they often don’t link to things like e-portfolios.
An e-portfolio, or an electronic portfolio, is a way for students to
compile and showcase evidence of their learning experiences, both
inside and outside the classroom. An e-portfolio can include things
like writing samples, graphics, and pictures or videos of a project.10
For example, students in a coding bootcamp could have e-portfolios that
include samples of code they’ve written and links to websites or
applications they’ve developed. E-portfolios are different from
traditional transcripts because they are owned and curated by the
student, and the student can decide who can view the e-portfolio.11
Most employers feel that e-portfolios are useful in evaluating whether
job applicants have needed skills, rather than relying on resumes and
transcripts alone.12
While learners can display things like digital badges on their LinkedIn
profiles, a LinkedIn profile doesn’t provide evidence of mastery for
other types of credential attainment, like degrees. In addition, much
of the content on resumes and LinkedIn profiles is self-reported, so
they are less verifiable than learning records coming from institutions
and other organizations in the education and workforce space.
Why are credentialing records fragmented, and why don’t learners own more of their data?
Currently, there is no widely-used digital infrastructure to easily
store, share, and display credentials. However, there are nascent
efforts to change this.
A variety of higher education institutions have begun developing
different next-generation learning records. In particular, the American
Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and the
National Association of Student Affairs Professionals, with support
from Lumina Foundation, are working to help higher education
institutions develop and implement the Comprehensive Learner Record
(CLR). The CLR is digital and would provide richer information on
learning than the traditional transcript by, for example, linking to
e-portfolios and describing hard and soft skills the learner has
gained. It would provide a more holistic picture of each learner by
providing richer information on learning that happens outside the
classroom, including through co-curricular activities, internships, and
apprenticeships. CLRs would also include information on learning
experiences that happen throughout a person’s life, such as high school
or even earlier.
There are barriers to CLR development and adoption, which range from
technological barriers to lack of buy-in or competing projects. For
example, even within a single university, the different pieces of
information that will end up in a CLR exist in different data storage
systems, and it can be technologically challenging and time-consuming
to bring these different data systems together.13 Bringing in data from
employers, the military, and other educational institutions—which also
have different data systems—adds to this challenge. Different
institutions are developing CLRs, and the T3 Innovation Network is
working to develop a technical standard for CLRs so they are
interoperable across institutions, employers, and the military. This
work is currently in pilot project stages.14
In addition to the Comprehensive Learner Record, a consortium of
universities, including MIT, Harvard, and the University of California,
Berkeley, is working to create a shared digital infrastructure that
aims to become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and
verifying credentials.15 Essentially, the Digital Credentials
consortium is developing a secure “digital envelope” for things like
the CLR, as well as a way to share that envelope across institutions.
The consortium’s efforts are still underway, and one challenge will be
to develop the technology and technical standards to make the envelope
a reality, as well as to access funding needed to do this work.16
Conclusion
Lifelong learning will be crucial as automation continues to change the
nature of work. We need a 21st century credentialing system that allows
people to easily share their learning experiences with different
employers and training institutions throughout their careers as they
change jobs or learn new skills in a variety of settings, including the
military, prison, or on the job.
Yet the current postsecondary credentialing system is fragmented and
lacks interoperability. The lack of a 21st century credentialing
infrastructure makes it difficult for people to share a comprehensive
picture of their learning experiences with employers and training
institutions. Credentials also lack transparency, making it difficult
for employers and institutions to understand what skills a person
actually has, or for learners to know which credentials would best help
them reach their career goals.
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