Our economy is full of talent. But current talent engagement strategies do not adequately identify and connect people to meet existing workforce needs. Jobseekers with strong work histories, demonstrated skills, and industry-recognized credentials are often overlooked by systems and employers if they don’t have degrees. This limits the number of candidates available to employers and creates yet another obstacle for those already facing barriers to workforce participation.
For too long, we have used degrees as a signifier of skills or knowledge. What if we could see the full richness of the abilities that jobseekers have? Shifting the current hiring practices to focus on skills would open the labor market to candidates who might have previously been overlooked or systematically excluded, reducing labor market shortages while providing opportunities for economic advancement.
A learning and employment record (LER) is a collection of digital records that can document learning and skills. Through an LER, people can progressively describe their skills and abilities, and access and control the digital records that confirm them.
The digital credentials records that make up an LER can be issued to people through digital wallets on a smartphone app or on the web. Over the course of a lifetime, people can continue to collect records of their skills gained from different learning experiences, workplaces, training organizations, licensing bodies, and military or community service experiences, each in its own digital wallet. Because this information comes from different places and can be in multiple wallets, it is imperative that the record can be moved from wallet to wallet so that people can keep track, control, and remix these credentials in pursuit of future opportunities.
To build this collection, learners and workers need to be able to move their records from one wallet to another. Interoperable standards allow people to show the credential and other data about their skills to others, giving jobseekers control of how the information is both stored and shared.
Verifiable Credentials (VC) are an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization responsible for standardizing Web technologies. This standard provides a uniform structure for presenting information about who issued the credential and who earned it, and how to verify that the information has not been altered.
When digital credentials are issued in the VC format, they are tamper-evident and cryptographically signed. This process makes VC different from other digital documents because they demonstrate that a credential is unaltered and still valid, even if the institution no longer exists.
Digital verifiable credentials give hiring managers a trustworthy, accurate source of information about their applicants, and jobseekers the ability to prove they have the skills they need to pursue opportunities that give them a chance at economic advancement.
See how LERs show up in the world.
