For years, digital credentials have been promoted as tools that can strengthen the connection between education and employment. They promise to help learners showcase verified skills, provide employers with richer information about candidates and support more equitable, skills-based hiring practices. However, despite significant investment and growing interest, widespread adoption has remained elusive.
Recent research from 1EdTech helps explain why. Drawing on industry convenings, employer engagement, working group discussions, community feedback and findings from leading workforce research organizations, the reports identify consistent challenges in how credential data is interpreted and used in hiring. The findings reveal that the challenge is not a lack of solutions. Rather, employers often struggle to find, trust, interpret and use credential data within existing hiring workflows, while technical barriers continue to limit how credential information moves between systems.
The research informed two reports that also make something else clear: Higher education institutions have a critical role to play in closing these gaps.
If colleges and universities want digital credentials to become valuable workforce signals rather than digital versions of paper certificates, they should focus on four priorities.
1. Partner with Employers When Designing Credentials
One of the clearest findings from employer research is that employers value skills information but only when it reflects skills they actually need and understand. Too often, credentials are designed primarily from an academic perspective. While learning outcomes may be meaningful within an institution, they may not translate easily into hiring decisions. Employers are left trying to interpret unfamiliar language, inconsistent skill descriptions or credentials that do not clearly communicate workplace relevance.
The solution is straightforward: Involve employers earlier and more often. Institutions should work directly with industry partners when developing credentials, certificates, microcredentials and degree pathways. Employers can help identify the skills, competencies and evidence that matter most in hiring decisions, ensuring credentials communicate value beyond the campus. When employers recognize their own language and priorities in credential data, they are far more likely to trust and use it.
2. Include the Data Employers Need
Getting the language right is only part of the equation. The reports found that credential data must also be presented in a consistent structure and include validated evidence of achievement to be useful in hiring decisions. When information is incomplete, unclear or difficult to compare, employers often default to familiar signals such as degrees and resumes.
Higher education institutions can address this challenge by ensuring that credentials contain a consistent set of workforce-relevant information, including clearly defined skills, competency descriptions, achievement criteria, issuing information, evidence of learning and other data elements that help employers understand what a learner knows and can do.
The goal is not to overwhelm employers with more information. It is to provide structured, trusted information that supports faster screening, stronger candidate matching and greater confidence in hiring decisions. Institutions should view every credential as a communication tool. If employers cannot quickly understand its value, the credential is unlikely to influence hiring outcomes.
3. Push Platform Providers to Support Standards and Data Exchange
Even when institutions create high-quality credentials, that information often struggles to move effectively across systems. The report, “Building Seamless LER Systems: A Path to Scalable Credential Data Sharing,” found that many organizations rely on a patchwork of standards-based tools and custom integrations to make credential ecosystems function. These workarounds increase complexity, limit scalability and create barriers to adoption.
Higher education leaders should not assume their technology providers are automatically solving this problem. Institutions should actively ask their credentialing, student information, career services and talent management platform providers to support the standards and APIs that enable seamless credential sharing and interoperability. They should expect providers to support modern approaches to credential exchange, learner-controlled records and standards-based interoperability rather than relying on proprietary integrations.
Purchasing decisions can have an enormous impact on ecosystem adoption. When institutions consistently prioritize interoperability and standards compliance, technology providers respond. The result is a stronger ecosystem where credential data can move more easily between learners, educational institutions, employers and workforce platforms.
4. Use Digital Credentials in Your Own Hiring Process
Perhaps the most overlooked recommendation is also the simplest: If institutions believe digital credentials can improve hiring, they should start using them themselves. Higher education institutions collectively employ millions of people across academic, administrative, technical, healthcare facilities, and student support roles. They are among the largest employers in many communities. However,many institutions still rely almost exclusively on resumes, degrees and traditional application materials when evaluating candidates.
By incorporating digital credentials into hiring workflows, institutions can streamline candidate verification, gain firsthand insight into the challenges employers face and help normalize skills-based hiring. Using credentials internally also allows institutions to evaluate how skills data is presented and used within recruitment systems while identifying opportunities for technical and process improvements. Most importantly, it demonstrates confidence in the credentials they issue and signals to employers that these credentials are worth considering in hiring decisions.
Moving from Promise to Practice
The findings from both 1EdTech reports point to an encouraging conclusion: The foundation for a more connected, skills-focused ecosystem already exists. The challenge is not inventing another credential standard, another platform or another data model. The challenge is ensuring that credential information is relevant, understandable, interoperable and trusted.
Higher education institutions are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation.
By partnering with employers to define skills, embedding meaningful data into credentials, demanding interoperability from technology providers and using credentials in their own hiring practices, institutions can help bridge the gap between education and employment.
Digital credentials have the potential to become powerful tools for learner mobility and workforce development. Realizing that potential will require more than issuing credentials. It will require designing them, sharing them and using them in ways that work for employers and learners alike.