Skills-first hiring is gaining traction. Across industries, employers are rethinking job requirements, moving beyond degree-only models and opening doors to a broader, more diverse talent pool. Employers are recognizing that the best candidate for a job isn’t always the one with a traditional degree.
Organizations like the SHRM Foundation, Opportunity@Work and the Business Roundtable are helping employers rethink job design, promotion pathways and sourcing strategies.
The benefits of skills-based hiring approaches include broader access to diverse and nontraditional talent, improved alignment between workforce needs and workforce readiness, and greater adaptability in fast-changing sectors.
However, one of the biggest challenges remains in the talent pipeline—validating a person’s knowledge and skills with confidence. In a world where resumes don’t always tell the full or accurate story and AI can seemingly augment these subjective documents of experience, one question looms large: How can employers that rely on technology to filter candidates confidently hire for skills they can’t directly see or measure? One answer may be hiding in plain sight: certifications.
Certifications: A Bundle of Trusted Skills
Certifications are much more than just paper (or digital) credentials. In the best cases, they are curated, independently validated bundles of job-relevant skills. Often awarded after rigorous assessment or demonstration requirements, certifications are typically issued by third-party organizations such as industry associations. These organizations may be accredited by independent accreditation bodies. In many fields, certifications serve as a shorthand for readiness, reliability and relevance.
Unlike other credentials:
- Certifications indicate course or program completion.
- Certification-related licenses are usually government-issued and legally required for practice.
- Certifications are portable, grounded in competencies and industry recognized.
Certifications already play a vital role in information technology (e.g., CompTIA, Cisco), healthcare (e.g., Certified Nursing Assistant), and logistics (e.g., logistics, transportation and distribution; supply chain professional; planning and inventory management; transformation for supply chain), but they remain underused in broader hiring practices.
Certifications in Action: Linking Learning and Work
Across the learn-and-work ecosystem, strong models are taking shape:
- Hybrid curriculum models are integrating certifications into traditional education. Colleges are embedding industry-recognized certifications into academic programs, sometimes even purchasing content directly from certifying bodies.
- CareerOneStop, a U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored resource, helps users explore certifications aligned with career goals, offering searchable databases of credentials by industry and occupation. It’s a tool that both job seekers and employers can use to identify in-demand certifications.
- Connect + Degree, launched by Workcred and innovative community colleges, is pioneering a model where certification earners can earn credit toward degrees, creating ever more flexible pathways between learning and work.
- Credential alignment tools—some led by state agencies and others by nonprofits like Credential Engine—are making it easier to associate educational programs with certifications, using open standards like 1EdTech’s CASE (Competency and Academic Standards Exchange) and Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL is a standardized vocabulary and schema that describes credentials and related information) to associate certification skills and registered credentials on the open web.
- Youth and adult apprenticeships are embedding certifications into training pathways such as those led by Ascend Indiana’s youth pilot programs.
- Tech employers (e.g., Google, IBM, Amazon) are designing or recognizing certification pathways on their own learning platforms.
These innovations reflect a broad shift toward competency-aligned systems, where learning—regardless of where or how it happens—can be quickly validated and valued.
A Missed Opportunity for Employers?
Even as employers undertake skills-first strategies, certifications are often overlooked in practice. Consequences include:
- Overlooking qualified candidates who lack degrees but hold high-value certifications
- Narrowing talent pipelines, excluding individuals who have pursued community colleges, military service or career-changer paths
- Dealing with longer onboarding periods due to missed opportunities to identify job-ready skills in their applicant tracking system’s candidate funnel
However, current research shows employers value complementary certifications alongside degrees as signals of career readiness. Research published in 2023 by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (The Career Ready Graduate: What Employers Say About the Difference College Makes) found that 68% of employers said they, “would prefer to hire a college graduate with at least one microcredential.”
Certifications offer a trusted signal of knowledge and skill, especially when combined with work experience, project portfolios or applied learning. They help bridge the education—employment divides and support individuals navigating nonlinear paths. Now with the expanding adoption of digital credentials, they are also instantly verifiable by HR Tech platforms.
The Digital Credentials Frontier: Role of 1EdTech Standards
As certifications are represented by digital credentials, the need for trust, portability and usability has grown. That’s where the work of the 1EdTech Consortium is central. 1EdTech (formerly IMS Global) is the nonprofit membership community providing the open standards infrastructure to ensure digital certifications are machine-readable, interoperable and easily shareable, and securely verifiable.
Key standards advancing this transformation include:
- Open badges—the worldwide standard for portable, tamper-resistant digital credentials
- Comprehensive learner record (CLR)—to aggregate validated learning achievements and pathways across settings
- CASE—to align certifications and competencies to trusted, authoritative frameworks
When these open standards are adopted, an individual’s certifications become discoverable and actionable—capable of being ingested by HR systems, embedded in a growing market of digital wallets or learning and employment record (LER)-based resumes—and trustable across platforms. This infrastructure isn’t just about data. It’s about building a smarter and more equitable labor market beyond the exclusivity of degree holders.
What Employers Can Do Now
For employers exploring how certifications fit into skills-first strategies, several themes are emerging:
- Many hiring organizations are mapping key roles to certifications already in the market, rather than creating new interview assessments from scratch.
- Job descriptions are being revised to reflect competencies, not just degrees, and certifications can serve as an important kind of competency signal.
- Talent leaders are partnering with training providers, industry associations and HR tech platforms to better integrate verifiable certification data into HR systems.
- Some employers are beginning to support certification attainment internally, using it as a key strategy for upskilling and retention.
As you would expect, there’s no universal approach covering all industry segments, but as more employers share their models and metrics, the field is learning what works and what’s scalable.
Certifications and the Ecosystem at Large
Certifications sit at the crossroads of education and workforce, and now they have been supercharged by technology. Their growing relevance is tied to several ecosystem-wide efforts:
- Credential transparency initiatives working to help people navigate the crowded and confusing education and training marketplace (e.g., Credential Engine, Education Quality Outcomes Standards or EQOS).
- LER and digital wallet pilots in states like Alabama, Indiana, Colorado, Utah and more.
- Data standards coalitions, including 1EdTech and HR Open Standards Consortium.
As these efforts converge, we believe certifications will play a foundational role in how we define, discover and reward talent.
Closing Thought: More Than a Trend—A Talent Bridge
Certifications aren’t new, but their importance is being rediscovered. As the drive toward skills-first hiring continues, they offer a scalable, trusted and flexible way to signal real-world capability. For employers aiming to build dynamic, diverse and future-ready workforces, certifications can serve not as gatekeepers but as bridges connecting individuals to opportunity.
Some suggested actions to strengthen a skills-first strategy for workforce development include:
- Exploring relevant certifications for job roles using CareerOneStop’s Certification Finder
- Using credential alignment tools like Credential Engine to connect certifications with academic and training programs
- Adopting open standards from 1EdTech to make certifications verifiable, portable and trusted*
- Sharing success stories—how certifications are being used to strengthen the workforce
- Inviting more groups to join the ecosystem conversation to expand the voices in this growing area of interest
* Organizations can adopt the standards directly or use products that are certified compliant.
Please share your ideas with us. 1EdTech and the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library are working together to share this information widely: https://learnworkecosystemlibrary.com/contact/, https://www.1edtech.org/form/contact-us
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