Microcredentials, Skills Badging, LER's, and Credit for Prior Learning Resources

Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing social and economic inequality. All these problems could be alleviated, the authors say, if employers focused on job candidates’ skills instead of their degree status. Drawing on their interviews with corporate leaders, along with their own experience in academia and the business world, the authors outline a “skills-first” approach to hiring and managing talent. It involves writing job descriptions that emphasize capabilities, not credentials; creating apprenticeships, internships, and training programs for people without college degrees; collaborating with educational institutions and other outside partners to expand the talent pool; helping hiring managers embrace skills-first thinking; bringing on board a critical mass of nondegreed workers; and building a supportive organizational culture. IBM, Aon, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and Merck are among the companies taking this approach—and demonstrating its benefits for firms, workers, and society as a whole.

Strada supports programs, policies, and organizations that strengthen connections between education and employment in the U.S., with a special focus on helping those who have faced the greatest challenges securing opportunity through postsecondary education or training.

The challenge: what’s preventing high school work-based learning from becoming more widespread?

Neil, Morgan, and Phil start a mini-series looking at an early 2024 roundup of online education with a view on products. Specifically, how should we view the multiple reports about microcredentials and noncredit offerings as a key strategy for online education moving forward, and are efforts from co…

Taylor Kendal, President of LEF delves into open source initiatives such as digital wallets to revolutionise education and employment records infrastructure.

For many employers in recent decades, adding college degree requirements seemed an efficient filter. More proxy than direct measure, degrees were perceived as indicators of persistence, of foundational skill, and of general capability. For hiring managers who themselves had traveled that cursus hono

New efforts on campus focus on ways to capture what students learn outside class -- and how to communicate it to employers.

CIC Launches A Multi-Year Work-Based Learning Initiative for Member Institutions

Introducing the 2023 Experiential Learning Awards, curated by Forage. These awards rank the best colleges and universities in the United States for experiential learning.

SkillsFWD is a bold new initiative on a mission to catalyze a more equitable skills-based hiring ecosystem leveraging learning and employment records.

25 Colleges. One University.

Higher ed needs to focus on providing credit for prior learning that properly communicates what learners know to provide them with more opportunities in the workforce.

Four areas worth watching that will impact the skills-based hiring ecosystem in 2024 and beyond.

More than 70 million adults in the United States are skilled through community college, workforce training, bootcamps, certificate programs, military service or on-the-job learning, rather than through a bachelor’s degree. Learning and employment records (LERs) could play a critical role in advancing skills-based hiring practices and ensuring they are implemented equitably.

Who doesn’t like a good Top 10 list in January? To build the SmartReport I needed to dig deeply into every corner of the LER ecosystem. And I had the good fortune to interview some of the smartest people in the business. The big takeaway is that the future is bright, momentum is building, and there is a dizzying amount of innovation happening. Here are the top ten trends that my research revealed.

Microcredentials open up possibilities for just-in-time, highly personalized learning, which is exactly what both students and employers need to meet workforce demands.

/PRNewswire/ -- Territorium, a global education technology leader with over 13 million users worldwide, announced today a new initiative with The University of...

A new survey found training partnerships between employers and four-year colleges fell between 2022 and 2023 while instruction provided by third-party providers rose.

The CFHETS foundational projects are focused on critical issues at the intersection of higher education and talent strategy.

A new study found 86 percent of faculty and staff say there’s a need for new skills-based learning models, but only 22 percent of their institutions had implemented them.

Employers value skills data for multiple reasons.

/PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation today announced a $1.5 million grant from American Student Assistance® (ASA) – a national nonprofit...