In UpSkill America report for WGU, employers shed light on value of digital credentials and skills profiles – and where improvement is needed.
Learning and Employment Records, including digital credentials and skills profiles hold tremendous potential to aid hiring and talent management decisions, but employers want more clarity on interpreting and validating what these credentials indicate about a person’s knowledge and skills, according to a new report by UpSkill America.
More work is needed, too, to integrate them into employer hiring systems. Employers view digital credentials as a positive signal of a prospective or current employee’s growth and self-improvement mindset, but few have implemented systematic ways to recognize and integrate digital credentials in the hiring process. They aren’t sure what credentials indicate about knowledge and skill levels or how they validate specific competencies and job preparation. The lack of uniformity among digital credentials and skills profiles is also problematic and makes it hard for employers to evaluate their value, credibility and how they align with jobs.
As one study participant said, digital credentials and skills profiles have the potential to create order in what is now a “complex web of mess,” while another said employers need a “magic decoder ring” to know how to interpret these records.
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Digital credentials are electronic documents or badges that signify a person’s qualifications, expertise and knowledge and achievements. A skills profile is a document that summarizes an individual’s skills, knowledge and experience.
“The employers we interviewed said they struggle with the broad variety of digital credentials available and don’t know how to equate a specific credential to a specific skill set and then to a specific job,” said Haley Glover, senior director at UpSkill America and author of the report. “There are significant opportunities for Learning and Employment Record developers to build and adapt their tools and platforms to meet employers’ needs.”
UpSkill America, an initiative of the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program, conducted the qualitative study on behalf of Western Governors University. WGU requested the study to inform its work on digital credentials and its Achievement Wallet, an in-development tech tool aimed at helping students catalog their existing skills and competencies and how they relate to careers of interest. The research was supported by a grant from the Gates Foundation.
At WGU, digital credentials, both standalone and embedded in degree programs, offer an avenue to fulfill its mission of providing multiple pathways to opportunity that change people’s lives for the better.
“WGU recognizes that employers need better information about how to make credentials a key component of the hiring process and we are working to provide clear, easy-to-use and easy-to-integrate information that our graduates can use to demonstrate to employers what they know and what they can do,” said Courtney Hills McBeth, WGU’s chief academic officer and provost.
Glover interviewed representatives from 12 companies in March 2024. Participants represented a variety of roles, organizations and industries. All participants had some familiarity with skills-based concepts.
The report includes numerous recommendations for providers of digital credentials and skills profiles on how to make these records more user-friendly for employers, from design features to integration with hiring systems, and what’s needed to better verify and validate the competencies and skills gained.
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