As career pathways evolve, learners need clearer ways to understand the skills they gain through education and how those skills translate into employment opportunities. Connecting competency-based learning with portable, verified credentials can help institutions support people as they move between education and work throughout their lives. In this interview, Beth Barrie discusses how institutions can make the connection between learning and career opportunities more visible and how verified digital credentials can support lifelong learning.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): What does a truly connected learner-to-earner career journey look like, and where do you think institutions have a lot of work to do?
Beth Barrie (BB): I can give an example of the state of Utah. A year or two ago, their legislature passed a bill mandating that grades nine through 20, essentially high school through an undergraduate degree, have to be skill-based. So, they’re skillifying their curricula and creating a learning employment record for the state of Utah.
To me, understanding what people need to be able to do with the knowledge that comes through education is essential. And if you start that at a young age, eventually we’re moving toward a competency-based education environment.
Skill and competency are very similar. It’s kind of like course objectives versus learning outcomes. Essentially, the idea is: What does somebody need to be able to do with the things that they’re learning and what they know? And how do they demonstrate that? How do you know it when you see it? Education needs to get better at helping people understand the skills they’re getting in a course, rather than just grades or course names on a transcript. If people understand it, employers will also understand it.
Evo: How can institutions make the relationship between coursework, the skills students are acquiring and their career opportunities a lot more visible while they’re still pursuing their education and not just at the end?
BB: One of the best examples I’ve seen is WGU. They have an achievement wallet, and while they’re a credit-hour institution, all their courses are competency based. Students can see the skills they’re developing along with job information, and it will visually map the skills they have to the skills they need for a job they’re interested in.
More schools could work with employers to make those connections visible, and that information is available through national job databases, so you don’t necessarily have to have an employer relationship to get started. It’s more accurate if you have actual employers and their job descriptions, but you could also generalize it through the Department of Labor’s databases. That’s really the opportunity: helping students see, while they’re still in school, what skills they’re developing, what skills they’re missing and how those skills connect to the careers they’re interested in.
Evo: How might institutions rethink that traditional idea of what a student journey looks like, so education can meet everybody where they are no matter what stage they’re at?
BB: The future is about giving the individual a place to store their credentials and skills, whether those are earned through education or employment. There are a lot of different terms for this now—learning and employment records, talent ecosystems, talent marketplaces and learning mobility—but the idea is really the same.
It’s important that any platform clearly signals the difference between a self-attested skill and a digitally verified credential. You’d want both, but an employer needs to be able to see, “Okay, they say they can do this,” versus, “Somebody has verified that they can do this.” That verification could come from a professor or an employer.
Higher ed has a big role to play as a validator of credentials. We’re already seeing that with microcredentials and digital badges. The next step is figuring out how employers can contribute to that record too, for example, having a supervisor attest to a skill and proficiency level. Then you really have a lifelong record that follows someone from learning into employment and back again.
Evo: What role can the credentials play in helping learners make sense of their journey?
BB: Having some sort of platform like WGU’s Achievement Wallet that lays it out for a student is really powerful. I could imagine it taking the different skills I have and showing me, “Oh, this is a career pathway I hadn’t even considered, but I have these skills that match up to it.” You can click through different jobs based on the skills you already have, and if you have a skill gap, it can even show you, “If you take this course, it will give you these skills.” That’s genius in my mind.
It also requires a big culture change in higher ed. We tend to traditionally be like, “Okay, you graduated. Have a good life.” But we should be thinking, “We want you coming back. We want repeat visitors.” Is there ever really a finish line?
Then are structural things that have to change, too. If institutions are funded based on student credit hours and completion rates, how do you fund competency-based education? Maybe there’s an incentive for someone who gets a credential, then comes back and gets another credential. The funding model has to be part of that conversation.
Evo: You’ve talked about the need to move beyond the credit hour and toward more competency- and skill-based education. What do you think it will take for institutions to make that shift, particularly when it comes to rethinking learning assessments and making sure what students are learning reflects what employers need?
BB: The conversation around reduced-credit-hour degrees is one of the biggest signals that competency-based education is coming, but reducing the credit hour is a little bit of a straw man. We can debate how low the credit-hour degree can go, or we can do the work of becoming more skill- and competency-based, which is what our employers need.
And honestly, AI gives us a great opportunity because faculty are having to rethink how they assess in a way they never have before. If we’re rethinking assessment, why not make it skill-based? Let’s teach the skills and assess whether students can actually do them.
We have an opportunity to bring employers into that process. If an instructional designer is already working with a faculty member on an assessment, why not run it by an employer and ask, “Is this something you would actually have someone do on the job?” If not, what would be more appropriate? We’re doing that work anyway. It’s just giving one more person’s opinion, and the impact is worth the extra effort.
Evo: Is there anything you’d like to add?
BB: this topic has so much face validity. When I talk to people about what if somebody could have an achievement wallet on their phone and see all their skills and accomplishments, no one says, “What a dumb idea.” But I’ve been talking about it for four or five years, and we’re still working through how to operationalize it on campus.
AI will accelerate how quickly we’re willing to work in this area because we no longer know exactly what a student needs to know. Employers are also figuring out what they need an employee to be able to do versus what they want AI to do.
So, the next couple of years will be a little bit of chaos, and we might as well use that time to build some better structures. My hope is that the traditional transcript goes away—one that just lists the course name, the grade and the credit hours. It needs to be better than that. We can do better.
Photo caption: Today’s learn-and-work ecosystem requires more than the traditional transcript to accurately convey what learners know. Competency-based learning along with verified credentials can help learners communicate the skills they’ve acquired to prospective employers.