he rapid change towards a skills-based economy and new-collar jobs has been underway for years as both employers and employees adapt to new economic patterns reflected in the changing nature of work itself. Work has changed such that we no longer have one career but many; we bring value to our jobs based upon the skills we have, not the job title we hold; and we collaborate across teams and around the world, not just with our colleagues in the next office. In the current situation, where millions of workers have been displaced from the travel, hospitality and restaurant industries, which may not recover for years, there is a critical need to understand the skills people have and how those skills can help them find employment in adjacent and growing industries such as grocery stores and ecommerce. It has exposed the fault lines in how poorly we understand, validate, and work with the skills people have, making it much more difficult to help millions of people move from one career to another. It has also shown that the current talent market for job seekers and employers is incapable of handling the challenges of rapidly reskilling and reemploying these millions of displaced workers.
The movement towards a skills-based economy has driven explosive growth in the use of credentials as exemplars of people’s skills. In the United States alone, there are at least 738,428 unique credentials across 17 separate subcategories. These credentials are offered by a myriad of organizations (education institutions, industry organizations, employers, credentialing organizations, and governments). To optimize the use of these credentials and increase their value for decision-making, we need to address the fragmented nature of managing and exchanging credentials. Integrating this disjointed global market, such that it provides high value to its users, will require an enabling governance strategy and technical infrastructure that provides a secure, trusted, and well-managed utility function for all skills-based credentials.
As we reimagine the talent marketplace, we must use advanced cross-industry technology solutions to enable skills-based talent management processes at scale. These solutions and processes will require sophisticated technologies like blockchain and augmented intelligence that provide high trust and validated information about people’s concrete skills. An infrastructure of this type can be used to provide high-fidelity support to learners, businesses, and academia in managing the rapid growth and proliferation of skills-oriented credentials. In addition, it will allow for consequential decisions around hiring and career advancement to be made in a more seamless, scalable, and integrated fashion. As an example, Walmart, CVS and other firms are planning on hiring more than 800,000 workers during the COVID-19 outbreak. Addressing the challenges of sifting through and recruiting from the millions of displaced workers interested in those open jobs would tax any organization. A global credential utility that provided an efficient and integrated infrastructure to manage the talent acquisition process and provided displaced workers with insight to where their skills best matched the open jobs would greatly improve the way in which these job seekers and potential employers connect.
Critically, we must first solve the related governance and engineering challenges if we would like to provide a global credential utility at the intersection of industry and academia. Governance is essential because it manages both the adoption and use of common schemas and links data standards that assure the required interoperability for a seamless user experience. This means orchestrating the sharing of data between all systems of record, providing core data about an individual’s skills as well as managing the permissions for organizations and individuals to provide and use that data. The credential utility will need to provide the necessary tools to manage the continuing exponential growth and exchange of skills-based credentials. In order to do that, the utility will provide a trust anchor for skills-based credentials as well as information within the credential payload that describes the content, provenance, and relationship of the individual’s skills to careers. The utility will also enable interoperability of skills-based credentials between enterprises and individuals, support personalized career wallets, and enable the user with self-sovereign and autonomous control of their skills-based credentials. Assisting the millions of workers currently displaced will require the utility to operate efficiently and at global scale.
The engineering challenges for the utility are addressed by using blockchain. Blockchain can provide a distributed, secure platform that manages the required credential transactions and related privacy and security services for credential issuers, holders, and requestors. Blockchain also provides a trusted and permissioned means of issuing, updating, revoking, requesting, and managing credentials for key users of the utility. These key users are: issuers—credential granting organizations (colleges and universities, technical schools, certification organizations, and employers performing formal training); requestors—organizations requesting credentials (typically employers and educational institutions seeking to validate learner credentials); and holders or learners (students, employers, and others who have credentials they wish to maintain and permit others to view). The utility can have a global reach, encompassing every issuer, holder, and requester of credentials.
An example of this utility approach is the IBM cyber pilot done in partnership with the Learning and Employment Records initiative under the U.S. Department of Commerce. The cyber pilot will demonstrate an efficient, integrated solution/infrastructure that empowers learners to pursue and manage their cybersecurity career. The pilot will demonstrate how issuers can use credentials to align skills-based learning outcomes to both cybersecurity skills and jobs. It will showcase how employers and educators can use analytics and credentials to find and assess qualified cybersecurity candidates, determine skills gaps and curriculum for learners, academic institutions, and employees, and facilitate career paths into the cybersecurity field. It will also demonstrate how learners can leverage an integrated credentials wallet to facilitate a near frictionless transition into the cybersecurity workforce. The pilot will also focus on supporting underserved populations. Finally, the goal of the pilot is to accelerate the broad scale adoption of Learning and Employment records such that an infrastructure can quickly be created to support the displaced workers impacted by the Pandemic.
Addressing the challenges we face near term in helping workers displaced by the pandemic find jobs, and longer term getting in front of the changing nature of work requires that we pull together skills-based information and data about individuals. Work of this type between business and education must always be respectful of an individual’s right to control their own data and enable the data providers—K12, colleges and universities, employers, and governments—with the proper infrastructure, tools, and governance solutions to create a secure and sustainable infrastructure for years to come. With the use of advanced technologies we can ensure the required governance and engineering needed to address the changing nature of work while making it easier for people to chart their careers and find jobs. Creating a global infrastructure to support a skills-based economy can provide important tools to the millions of workers who have been forced to find new jobs and new careers.
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Getting People Back to Work with a Global Credential Infrastructure
Photo by David Werbrouck via Unsplash.
August 7, 2020
The shift toward a skills-based economy and new-collar jobs has been underway for some time, but job displacement caused by COVID-19 makes an acceleration of this shift more vital than ever.
T
he rapid change towards a skills-based economy and new-collar jobs has been underway for years as both employers and employees adapt to new economic patterns reflected in the changing nature of work itself. Work has changed such that we no longer have one career but many; we bring value to our jobs based upon the skills we have, not the job title we hold; and we collaborate across teams and around the world, not just with our colleagues in the next office. In the current situation, where millions of workers have been displaced from the travel, hospitality and restaurant industries, which may not recover for years, there is a critical need to understand the skills people have and how those skills can help them find employment in adjacent and growing industries such as grocery stores and ecommerce. It has exposed the fault lines in how poorly we understand, validate, and work with the skills people have, making it much more difficult to help millions of people move from one career to another. It has also shown that the current talent market for job seekers and employers is incapable of handling the challenges of rapidly reskilling and reemploying these millions of displaced workers.
The movement towards a skills-based economy has driven explosive growth in the use of credentials as exemplars of people’s skills. In the United States alone, there are at least 738,428 unique credentials across 17 separate subcategories. These credentials are offered by a myriad of organizations (education institutions, industry organizations, employers, credentialing organizations, and governments). To optimize the use of these credentials and increase their value for decision-making, we need to address the fragmented nature of managing and exchanging credentials. Integrating this disjointed global market, such that it provides high value to its users, will require an enabling governance strategy and technical infrastructure that provides a secure, trusted, and well-managed utility function for all skills-based credentials.
As we reimagine the talent marketplace, we must use advanced cross-industry technology solutions to enable skills-based talent management processes at scale. These solutions and processes will require sophisticated technologies like blockchain and augmented intelligence that provide high trust and validated information about people’s concrete skills. An infrastructure of this type can be used to provide high-fidelity support to learners, businesses, and academia in managing the rapid growth and proliferation of skills-oriented credentials. In addition, it will allow for consequential decisions around hiring and career advancement to be made in a more seamless, scalable, and integrated fashion. As an example, Walmart, CVS and other firms are planning on hiring more than 800,000 workers during the COVID-19 outbreak. Addressing the challenges of sifting through and recruiting from the millions of displaced workers interested in those open jobs would tax any organization. A global credential utility that provided an efficient and integrated infrastructure to manage the talent acquisition process and provided displaced workers with insight to where their skills best matched the open jobs would greatly improve the way in which these job seekers and potential employers connect.
Critically, we must first solve the related governance and engineering challenges if we would like to provide a global credential utility at the intersection of industry and academia. Governance is essential because it manages both the adoption and use of common schemas and links data standards that assure the required interoperability for a seamless user experience. This means orchestrating the sharing of data between all systems of record, providing core data about an individual’s skills as well as managing the permissions for organizations and individuals to provide and use that data. The credential utility will need to provide the necessary tools to manage the continuing exponential growth and exchange of skills-based credentials. In order to do that, the utility will provide a trust anchor for skills-based credentials as well as information within the credential payload that describes the content, provenance, and relationship of the individual’s skills to careers. The utility will also enable interoperability of skills-based credentials between enterprises and individuals, support personalized career wallets, and enable the user with self-sovereign and autonomous control of their skills-based credentials. Assisting the millions of workers currently displaced will require the utility to operate efficiently and at global scale.
The engineering challenges for the utility are addressed by using blockchain. Blockchain can provide a distributed, secure platform that manages the required credential transactions and related privacy and security services for credential issuers, holders, and requestors. Blockchain also provides a trusted and permissioned means of issuing, updating, revoking, requesting, and managing credentials for key users of the utility. These key users are: issuers—credential granting organizations (colleges and universities, technical schools, certification organizations, and employers performing formal training); requestors—organizations requesting credentials (typically employers and educational institutions seeking to validate learner credentials); and holders or learners (students, employers, and others who have credentials they wish to maintain and permit others to view). The utility can have a global reach, encompassing every issuer, holder, and requester of credentials.
An example of this utility approach is the IBM cyber pilot done in partnership with the Learning and Employment Records initiative under the U.S. Department of Commerce. The cyber pilot will demonstrate an efficient, integrated solution/infrastructure that empowers learners to pursue and manage their cybersecurity career. The pilot will demonstrate how issuers can use credentials to align skills-based learning outcomes to both cybersecurity skills and jobs. It will showcase how employers and educators can use analytics and credentials to find and assess qualified cybersecurity candidates, determine skills gaps and curriculum for learners, academic institutions, and employees, and facilitate career paths into the cybersecurity field. It will also demonstrate how learners can leverage an integrated credentials wallet to facilitate a near frictionless transition into the cybersecurity workforce. The pilot will also focus on supporting underserved populations. Finally, the goal of the pilot is to accelerate the broad scale adoption of Learning and Employment records such that an infrastructure can quickly be created to support the displaced workers impacted by the Pandemic.
Addressing the challenges we face near term in helping workers displaced by the pandemic find jobs, and longer term getting in front of the changing nature of work requires that we pull together skills-based information and data about individuals. Work of this type between business and education must always be respectful of an individual’s right to control their own data and enable the data providers—K12, colleges and universities, employers, and governments—with the proper infrastructure, tools, and governance solutions to create a secure and sustainable infrastructure for years to come. With the use of advanced technologies we can ensure the required governance and engineering needed to address the changing nature of work while making it easier for people to chart their careers and find jobs. Creating a global infrastructure to support a skills-based economy can provide important tools to the millions of workers who have been forced to find new jobs and new careers.
