What If Every Graduate Left School with a Credential That Actually Meant Something? | Edson Barton

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, host Mason Pashia sits down with Edson Barton, CEO and co-founder of YouScience, to explore what it truly means to build a credentialing system that delivers value to learners, not just paperwork. Drawing on Utah’s landmark House Bill 260, which mandates stackable credentials for all graduates and positions YouScience as the infrastructure powering that vision, Edson and Mason unpack what an end-to-end career readiness ecosystem looks like when it is grounded in science, driven by aptitude, and designed to answer every student’s most fundamental question: why am I learning this?

Edson shares his own winding, non-linear education story as a lens into why the current system fails so many passionate learners, and how aptitude-based guidance, layered with stackable industry certifications, can illuminate a meaningful path from middle school discovery all the way to a first career credential. The conversation covers the grain size of credentials, the challenge of interoperability and learner wallets, how to bring skeptical parents on board, and why the skills recognition movement, accelerated by AI, may finally have the technology to match its ambition. For education leaders looking to move from compliance to coherence, this episode is a compelling and practical case for reimagining what student readiness can mean.

Transcript

Mason Pashia: You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. About a year ago to the day I had a chat with a few members of the YouScience ecosystem showcasing how partners on both the education and the workforce side of the equation can leverage their platform to provide powerful work-based experiences for students. In the time since I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about credentialing, specifically trying to figure out how do we make skill credentials, the supposed new currency of the labor economy means something more than a blue ribbon that you could buy at the party store down the street. Put these two things together and you get today’s conversation.

So I’m super excited to dig in a little bit further at this intersection of the YouScience ecosystem credentialing and how do we make things mean real value for learners? So I’m joined today by Edson Barton, CEO, and co-founder of YouScience Science to chat about their approach to skills, credentialing pathways, and hopefully much more.

Edson. Thanks so much for being here.

Edson Barton | YouScience: Thanks for having me. I appreciate the conversation.

Mason Pashia: Edson Barton is a very unique name — it’s either the name of a a poet that has not been yet, or like a genius from a bygone era, and I love it. So this is one of my favorite names of the podcast this year. Awesome. So what was your own personal career navigation story? Maybe it involved poetry or invention, but where did you get started?

Edson Barton | YouScience: Well, I think you weren’t too far off in saying it might have been poetry or one or the other. It took at least a seven year journey through my post-secondary, and my secondary journey was probably even more lackluster than that. And so I think that formed a lot of who I am and why I am so passionate about what we’re doing as an organization, and

Really, the mission that we’re trying to espouse throughout, not just the industry, but throughout the entire economy. Really quickly, and I’ll try to make it short: I was not a good student. My mother liked to joke that Edson was an A or a D student. There was just no in-between with me, and what that really pointed to was that I really was passionate about learning.

I wanted to learn desperately, and what I found is that because of a lot of circumstances — a lot of times it had to do with my professors — the environment wasn’t very compelling to me, and so I would go out. So by the time I was a junior, I was working full-time. As a senior, I was managing a restaurant, or a couple of restaurants, and going to school.

And going to school. So I was working pretty close to 80 hours a week and going to school full-time, or more accurately, I was skipping class, working, and then showing up to class when I had to, to take a test and do something like that. Translating that then into the post-secondary, I’ll give you one quick example of something that just absolutely set my sights on the future of how to solve this problem.

I transferred from a junior college to a university, and I got to the university, and at that time the counselor sat me down and said, “Okay, what do you want to study?” And I said, “Well, I think I want to get an MBA, or I want to get a law degree, I’m not quite sure yet.” And quote, this is what she said, quote: “Oh good.

Then you can just study whatever you want for your bachelor’s program, because they’re going to teach you what you really need to know when you get to law school or your MBA program.” And right there I thought, this next four years — or in this case it was another, well, it was another four years from there — are going to be a complete waste.

To me, it’s absolutely no value. I’m here to learn, to do something, to prepare myself for a career, to provide for a future family, and to do the things that I need to do to make a difference in society, and you’re telling me that it doesn’t matter. And so, I finished my degree. It took me extra long to finish.

I jumped from program to program to program. I think I probably had seven programs that I tried, and it was all because I was passionate about learning, and finally I just said, I don’t care what people want me to do. I’m gonna take the classes that are gonna lead me to what I feel like I need to do.

Now, part of that was bullheadedness on my part, but part of it was a realization that things have got to change. People want value from our education system. That’s true at the K-12 level just as much as it is at the post-secondary level, and we discount that all the time. So, using my example again as kind of a basis of that, I would ask myself in a particular class, just like every single student has done throughout the history of time,

why am I learning this? And if the educator or the environment couldn’t answer that question for me — not just on a theoretical basis, but for me personally, why am I, Edson, learning this information today — if they couldn’t answer it, I checked out. And we know that that’s the case with the vast majority of students. Even the best students, that’s happening to them too; it just so happens that they’re built in a way that they do better in school than some of the rest of us.

So we have to answer that question. And if you break down that question really to its roots — why am I learning this today — it is a plea from a student to say, look, I am investing all of my time, my energy, my thought process, and I want value. So tell me what the value is. And that’s what it really boils down to.

So, across everything, this is about a value question. Education is about that, and the motivating factors that drive us to be, to be better in our education, to get better outcomes is a value proposition as well. So we have to answer that value proposition or else the rest of it breaks down.

That’s true for everything we do in life, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to us that it needs to work in education too, but we don’t treat it that way.

Mason Pashia: I think that makes a lot of sense. For the listeners who are not currently familiar with YouScience, I have a question, I’m going to try it, we’ll see if it works. How — talking through kind of YouScience’s functionality — how would YouScience have worked for you when you were a high school student, and what do you think it would’ve told you about yourself at that time?

Edson Barton | YouScience: Yeah, so just in general, YouScience is a platform with a product called BrightPath that helps guide a student from their earliest stages — but really from middle school at this point — all the way through their career selection, and it does it through a remarkable process that’s absolutely unique, and it’s the only process that works in the market today. It’s guidance based on aptitudes, through performance-based aptitudes.

And what an aptitude is, is that it is your inherent true nature. It is what you are inherently wired to do well, and it’s just like your dominant, non-dominant hand — you are actually born with your aptitudes. These are not things that are, are influenced by your environment. Now, the skills you build on your aptitudes are influenced by your environment, but not your aptitudes.

Just like your dominant, non-dominant hands, you’re born with that, and what we all know is that if we lean into those aspects of our dominance, then we excel faster. We do things better, we grow better, and not only that, we participate in our environment in better structured ways. If we lean into our aptitudes in our education process, then we actually get along with authority figures better because we understand each other better in those types of ways.

So going back to me, I would’ve been able to identify my natural talents in a way that other people didn’t quite understand. So, for example, growing up, I fell behind in school really early on for some family reasons, and so I always thought that I was bad at education because I was behind all the time, especially in math.

One of the things that I did really well was I was good at art of all different types, and so the adults in my life leaned into that. And so everybody would tell me, oh, Ed, you’re so good at art, you’re gonna be a great artist someday, keep doing that, you’ll be awesome. And so that builds you up as an individual.

And so what I did is I focused in those areas. Now, I love art, I really am talented in that area, and I was at the time. But it wasn’t what fulfilled me, because while it was utilizing some of my natural aptitudes, it wasn’t using my dominant aptitudes. So, at the time, if I would’ve had the tools that we have, I would’ve been able to see a more complete picture of who I was, and seeing the different opportunities that led from my aptitudes to these opportunities, and understood how I fit into that.

One of the things I mentioned was that I was running a restaurant at the age of 17, and I was doing better with that restaurant than all of the previous managers for 20 years had done. And the owner was in love with it because I was doing so much good, and what I realized during that period of time was that what I loved about art was the art of creation —

of taking something out of chaos, putting the systems together to make it work in a way that compelled people to want to do something with that. So at the time it was a sandwich shop, so I made better sandwiches. I figured out processes to do these things and engage with the customers, and I had more regular customers.

I felt like Cheers, you know, like Norm — I don’t know if that reference is gonna make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but anyway, it was one of those types of situations, and I started to realize that it was the art of creation and the aptitudes that fed into that, that I really enjoyed, and that’s really served me well as an entrepreneur and as a CEO, because that’s what you’re doing in those cases.

So that would’ve helped, and then attaching that to an outcome that I found valuable, which would’ve been a career outcome for me. I didn’t want to take classes for the sake of taking classes; I wanted to take classes to get an outcome. And the outcome could have been varied, but it needed to have an outcome, and so our tools help people do that. Not just one-to-one, of course, but it helps the masses be able to do that, and that’s what’s special about it.

Mason Pashia: Super helpful. Also in full agreement that a good sandwich is an art. I think that’s gonna be a key takeaway from the episode — that sandwich making is an art form. So we’re talking today because you all made an exciting announcement recently about the ways in which you’re working with the state of Utah.

So, the recent Utah House Bill 260 legislation mandates stackable credentials for all Utah graduates, with YouScience being kind of like the engine behind it, the platform that powers this movement. So what does this mean in practice? I know your previous company was really in this certification space, but what does it mean for every graduate to have stackable credentials, and for that to actually be mandated?

Edson Barton | YouScience: Yeah, so it’s a fantastic win, not just for us, but for the state, and hopefully for the rest of the nation, as it sets out a precedent of what is possible, and focused on outcomes. The bill is really the means to connect our K-12 system with the outcomes going into a career. So it’s everything that we’ve built, and making it more explicit inside of the systems that are offered by the state’s education system.

So, as an example, one of the things that we’re working on is the guidance piece into your proper career pathway. But that career pathway means something as it relates to the classes that you’re selecting in your particular school, wherever you’re at — if I’m in a rural school versus urban versus suburban.

We all have different choices, but how do the choices that I’m making, wherever I am locally, relate to the outcomes that I want to achieve down the road? And then, not just with that at the high school level, but how do those connect with all of the different types of outcomes that I could be getting at the post-secondary level as well, on the education front.

So, we have students across the board choosing AP courses or honors courses or this or that, but very few of them understand how that stacks up to get you the outcome that you actually want. I think one of the most common things for students that excel in school is they take these AP and honors courses, and then they find no value comes out of it when they get to the university level.

The classes are whitewashed over, and they have to take all of them again so often. So now in this process, we will attach which classes lead to which types of outcomes for the different universities and colleges at the state level, or apprenticeships or other types of post-secondary outcomes. If you’re taking a class that’s concurrent enrollment, we’ll show that directly to the student as they’re selecting those courses, and then relate that again to what types of outcomes those can get at the further points along their education journey.

All of that is informed by their aptitudes and the careers that attach to those. So now a student will have the guidance: “I have these aptitudes, tied to these careers. Okay, Edson, which career do you think you want to go towards?” “Well, I think I really want this one right here. I wanna be a sandwich builder.”

“Okay, excellent. To be a sandwich builder, you need to take these types of courses, and at our particular school we have this course, this course, and this course. We don’t have this course over here, so you may need to take that someplace else or down the road or at a post-secondary school. But you also get concurrent enrollment for these courses at this local community college, or wherever.”

And so now I can see this pathway that leads all the way to my outcome, and it’s all mapped out for me. Now, I can switch that at any time, and as I switch it, it automatically gives me other options as to what I do. It also works the reverse way. So if I’ve taken certain courses and I’ve decided — this is very common —

somebody says, “I want to go into the medical field,” so they start to take these courses in high school, but then they realize, “Ah, that’s not really what I want,” or “I hate this, the blood,” so I want to shift or pivot to another one. Well, you’ve taken a lot of stuff of value, and this leads into the credential conversation too, but you’ve done something of value.

How does that relate to where you want to pivot to? Can you build off of that? And so often in our education system — and it’s not the fault of anyone, because they want to do the right thing — but the systems aren’t constructed in a way that allows the pivot to happen and everybody involved to say, “Oh, okay, well here’s what that means.”

And you can actually graduate with a pathway completer status, or you can get this type of outcome, because you’ve already finished these things, so you haven’t lost anything. And, man, that happens at the college level all the time.

Mason Pashia: Oh yeah. No, I think this has huge implications for credit for prior learning, non-completers, all these — because if you were, depending on the grain size of the credential, you could credential a project within a course and have that be more than enough to get you a job in, like, geographical information systems or something.

One mapping project or you complete a course and that looks really good and maybe that’s enough to get you somewhere or you complete the full degree and that’s also a credential and also might open some doors So how I guess On that grain size question like if I was a student coming into this platform what credentials could I see for myself Like there’s a lot of conversations around the credentialing of skills so it’s like kind of a verified I’m a good critical thinker type badge architecture There’s industry recognized credentials which I think probably our audience is the most familiar with Um but that would be like OSHA or like a CNA or these other types of um Credentials that carry value because of the the thing you went through to get them Um but what what kinds of credentials are you envisioning in YouScience Mm-hmm

Edson Barton | YouScience: So we have, uh, we focus mostly on certifications directly. Um, but going to where you mentioned of. Validating all of these other types of skills that I may have developed over time becomes really important in the ongoing conversation. Um, but where we’ve started and where we kind of grew as a business was validating skills from a certification perspective.

Here you’ve learned these types of things. Now let’s validate those things and be able to prove that to the world so that you can use that as, as a credential of value to take to a potential employer. Most importantly for you as an individual to recognize you did something of value. So in our system today, we have over 220 different certifications in all different topic areas.

Um, that’s, uh, literally from welding to computer science to agriculture. You name it, we have something kind of under there. They’re all created with industry, um, industry experts to validate skills as you go along your education journey. Very importantly, I believe that we’re the only true stackable credential model in the entire, um, United States for sure, potentially in the world.

Um, and one of the things that we do is, years ago I worked with Microsoft and Adobe and all these organizations to develop certifications and publish those around the world. And they’re great and, and, and certifications at the more professional level are really important, but one of the things that they forget is how do you get there?

How do you as an individual has no knowledge of a particular area that has a desire to grow in a particular area? How do you level up and gain the skills that you need and prove those on an ongoing basis? Then you break that down even further. One of the major problems with the, the idea of pathways and credentials of value is that typically they’re being looked at at an end of pathway type of program kinda level, but that takes out and, and diminishes the actual reality on the ground.

Very, very few high schools have the ability to offer true full pathways. And so the way that we typically do it is a high school may have 4, 5, 6 full pathways in their high school. Some of the very biggest and, and well funded may have more, but on average it’s very few. And so as an individual, what typically happens on the ground is I’m a principal of a school.

I want to offer my kids computer science classes, but all I have is a multimedia teacher and I can’t recruit for the life of me, somebody who can teach computer science at the school. So what I do is I recruit the, the multimedia teacher who knows some HTML or knows basic web programming. I have her come over and start to teach a basic level one computer science course, basic programming.

Now what happens is a student is really excited. I, I want to get into that field. That sounds exciting to me. So I go and I take that course, but my high school doesn’t offer any other courses There. And so now the student has learned something, maybe even something very, very viable. Very real. They did really great in the course.

They earned those skills, but because all of the credentials are above that, I can’t prove my value to anybody, and I even question myself. Whether or not I learned anything of value. So we need to break that kind of away and say, instead of looking at it as let’s just reach this pinnacle and then let’s prove our value.

It should be, I prove my value every step of the way. Every course that I take, I am learning something of. And if you go back to that, you know, the original conversation about me and, and students asking, why am I learning this? If we can tell them, you are learning this today because this has value in the marketplace, industry has validated these things, and if you learned this, this has value to these types of employers.

Now all of a sudden, as a student, I know why I’m there. And it’s been proven that if you attach a certification to a classroom, students do better within that classroom setting. Um, and so you’ve now started the, the process of improvement one stage at a time. What it also does is it allows the individual, regardless of their environment, to stack different types of learning and credentials together to tell a story of who I am.

So it is true that I may come out of a, a, of a high school and I may not have earned the, the traditional type of pathway, but if I can validate that I took a coding course. That I took a marketing course that I took, you know, English honors, right? That I took a welding course even. And then I could go to a local business and say, yeah, I may not be the best welder in the world, but you know, what I can do is I can weld, uh, good enough and you can teach me some more, but I can also help in marketing the business better, or I can do these types of things.

That’s kind of an extreme case, but the reality is, is that type of stuff happens all the time. If you ask a high school graduate what they’ve learned in the high school, most of them can’t tell you that. If you certify. Yeah. If you certify those students though along the way, and then tell me, tell me what you learned through those certifications. Each step, they can most of the time rattle that stuff off because it meant something to them.

Mason Pashia: So I guess in practice, um uh the next few minutes I wanna sit a little more in just like the technical world of actually visualizing this within the platform So if I’m the student who enrolled in that intro to computer science class with the with the media teacher who is teaching basics and I there was there’s nowhere else for me to go but I have these kind of core HTML Fundamentals now or core HTML and CSS or whatever like I guess how does that manifest intoYouScience Are they getting a certificate for having completed the course Is there like an aptitude skill-based test within the program that’s like demonstrate kinda the peak of your mastery at this thing and then we will recognize that moment

Like how does it actually sit and what does the actual certificate say Is it like computer science basics, are there different kinds of um you could go in and be like I’m now good at Google Analytics and G Suite and that would technically be a domain maybe of a computer and science program if you’re in a more marketing emphasis but I’m just curious like how does it work and what would they actually see Uh but I love the all the storytelling narrative building components of this I think that’s awesome

Edson Barton | YouScience: Yeah. Yeah. It works very much like a, a, a traditional certification program today, so it is validating skills that you’ve learned and earned. So, uh, it’s not a course completion. We don’t, we don’t actually provide any courses. All we do is validate skills. So you’ll go in, you’ll take the course, and then we provide the certification at the end, and the student has to certify at a level high enough that earns the certification and, and the bar is quite high for all of those.

And then you get recognized as earning that certification. We then inside the platform actually provide, uh, the mechanism for you to hold onto that. And then share that with other people or employers, et cetera as they as you go. We also house all the other certifications that are outside of our own. So if you’ve earned another certification someplace else, great.

Import that into the system so that you have record of that. There and now you can build a portfolio. We have a, a resume builder inside of the platform that helps you construct that. And, and we’re evolving that all the time to make it more and more viable and, and better for students. So it, it’s really the recognition of learning and then the demonstration of that to the outside world.

Mason Pashia: So is the expectation here that if I’m designing an intro to computer science course I will have a cursory awareness that there’s a course within YouScience and try is it like a new set of standards in a way to like map it into the classroom Or like I if I’m a learner I don’t know how I like how would I know that it’s time to go demonstrate My capability here or to know that like what I learned in this course is actually gonna get me into the 90th percentile of this thing. That’s the piece that

Edson Barton | YouScience: Yeah, absolutely. So all of our standards for the certifications — again, think of it different than a course, because we’re not a course provider, but courses should be built off of standards that industry wants. So what we did that was fundamentally different is we went out and broke down the standards for higher-level certifications and higher-level jobs in all different areas, whether there was a certification or not.

In so many jobs there’s not a certification, so we went and met with industry experts, broke down the skills, and we brought them down to the starting level, entry level, all the way to mid-level, which is kind of our sweet spot where we focus. So then, each step of the way, the educator on this side would come look at our standards and say, “Okay, that’s exactly what I want to teach, and it’s what I need to teach, because industry is telling me these are the things that I need to teach.”

So I’m going to construct my class to follow the standards that are outlined for this certification, so that by the end of this class — whatever it may be, a year, a semester — I will know that I have taught all the content necessary to help my students earn this certification.

And so then the students, by the time they’re done, they should be able to — I encourage educators all the time — live by and love your standards, and give the standards for your course, your syllabus, but I think it should be standards.tGive those to the students, and then every time that they accomplish one of those, have your students go into their standard document and mark it off.aSay, “We learned this today, look at what you did that’s valuable to you,” and then they mark it off, and mark it off, and mark it off. And so by the time you’re done, you should have this document that says, “I’ve learned all these things, I’m ready to test on this, right? I’m ready to prove that I’ve validated my knowledge.”

Mason Pashia: And then there would be a test within YouScience that they could demonstrate, and then they would get some sort of certificate. I want to go slightly into the space of a learner wallet world. So, I guess a couple maybe fast questions: one would be, because you’re porting other certificates in, I assume — are these all pretty interoperable as far as being able to export your credentials into another platform? Like the ones that they earn actually within your tool that you’ve developed, or are they proprietary within

Edson Barton | YouScience: I would say they’re more proprietary than not, and the reason why is because all of the different systems are so disparate still. I mean, probably the most, the largest and kind of most used is like a Credly-type system, but they’re just — there isn’t a standard, and this world of trying to create a universal standard system has been around for ages.

I mean, we worked on it in the year 2000 — the company I was with was trying to work with Konia and some other groups to try to create a more universal system, and it’s just floundered over the years. So one of the things that the state of Utah has done is try to consolidate that, leveraging our platform as kind of the base of that, at least for the state.

Right. And could that grow into something else? Yes. Are there other platforms? Yes. Should there be more interoperability? Yes. It’s just that it’s hard. Probably more important, Mason, is that the employers on the other side don’t know where to go to do that. So if you’re an employer, and for one particular job you’re looking at 20 different platforms to try to validate people’s skills, it gets overwhelming really fast.

And so that’s where resumes still show up even though we all know they’re fairly ineffective. They’re still around because the boots-on-the-street reality kind of dictates that it’d be that way.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I think there’s some truth to that, but there’s also — like 1EdTech, for example, is doing a lot of pretty interesting open badges, three protocols and the case standards around being able to upload machine-readable versions of standard protocols. We now have AI that can do incredibly exponential interpretation of vast amounts of data. So I think what’s maybe more at the core of that is: a student goes through this credential, gets this badging or certification. The certification and badging protocols matter, to then be able to actually put that in another wallet — assuming, I think, that the student has access for 10 years after they

Edson Barton | YouScience: I’m super excited about what’s coming up, what hasn’t been good enough.

Mason Pashia: Right,

Edson Barton | YouScience: What’s coming, I think can help solve some of these problems for us.

Mason Pashia: Right. Yeah, I’d say the phrase I like to use from some of my LER friends is: LER is a religion looking for a Messiah. It’s a thing that exists but has no formalized leader. But I think it’s important and interesting that the federal government right now has a challenge for 15 new states to enter the LER building world.

So many states have adopted a statewide LER practice, and so Utah is kind of being one in this instance — it’s maybe a little bit different than a distinct LER, but it is similarly a stackable credentialing practice with mandates for students. And so I think it’s mostly just wanting to understand, and continue to push on having that be interoperable, in case your students leave the state or if they do anything else and need to transfer their information with them.

Edson Barton | YouScience: Well, and the federal government has a role here to help with that. In fact, one of our representatives from Utah is the chair of the post-secondary, higher education committees, Burgess Owens, and he’s been pushing the LER movement for a long time. He believes in that, and I think there’s a lot of legs behind that. There’s a lot of questions that have to be worked out, but luckily the technologies are catching up to make those things a reality. So I’m very excited about the possibilities there.

Mason Pashia: Me too. Um I have a couple specific questions around these um I guess opportunities for certification like does YouScience have a POV on Being responsive to local workforce needs in a like is a student who is in a specific school kind of encouraged to go down a pathway that’s closer to them I’m sure it’s all based first and foremost on aptitudes but then there.

may be like a regional layer or how do you all think about uh kind of localization mixing with personalization

Edson Barton | YouScience: I, well, one, I think it’s absolutely critical, so. Just to state that I think some, again, some of the ways that it’s been thought about and done to date has been a little bit misguided because we think about it, uh, let’s just say in my local area, big manufacturing area, and so therefore we need more jobs in manufacturing.

People aren’t taking those jobs, so let’s try to force more kids into those types of roles. And so we have more people working for our community. It’s, it’s, it’s a very outdated kind of, of way of thinking about it, of uh, and really kind of dictating the education process to the kids so that they, we get the outcomes that we want.

What actually happens when you really look at. Individual’s aptitudes is one. It actually lines up very, very well with the economy at large and the economy of most states. Now, when you look at it at the very local level, sometimes it doesn’t line up. You may have more kids who are, uh, should be engineers in your local area and.

Uh, less kids that need to be on the manufacturing side of that, um, you know, more of a technician type. And so sometimes it doesn’t quite work out. But what it does do is we can identify all of the students where their natural aptitudes are, and then we can identify those who have those best aptitudes for those types of roles.

We can start to work with them in a way. And so they end up naturally gravitating towards those roles instead of being lost after graduation and all these things. And now when they get into those roles, they like them better, which then brings down the need for bigger workforce because you have people who.

Capable and wanting to do more within their roles. And so you get this kind of best of bulk worlds. And then you can draw from other communities that have the people that you need as well. And now you have a reason for reaching out to those people instead of just some blanket, Hey, we have jobs, sort of thing.

It’s actually, Hey, we have jobs and we know that you are a type of person that could and should be working with us, so come on.

Mason Pashia: I love it Do you um I guess another question about the actual certifications that you’re offering like how do you stay Current and nimble with those I mean we’ve talked about computer science already Computer science looks radically different now than it does two years ago in insofar as like where people are waiting emphasis what the outlook is of people with like a lot of skills in that career. How how do you make sure that those offerings are to date and future ready like the at the menu level but also at like the content within them level Is that like a advisory board Just a a lot of ongoing meetings And what does that process look like?

Edson Barton | YouScience: Yeah, so we, we keep all of our products up to date on at least a three year rotating basis, so that’s the, the longest that a particular certification would go. Some, uh, areas aren’t evolving as fast as other areas right now with ai. We’ll see how that plays out with a lot of these areas. But the basics are the same.

So soil science is still soil science. The tools you may use to analyze soil may change over time, but soil science is kind of soil science. That was just an example. So. What, so we do have these bases. We have subject matter groups that come from industry and education. That’s something unique about us as we pull the educators into this because we want to make sure that the standards that are created and the certifications can actually be applied into the classroom as much of just saying, here’s a standard out there.

It’s okay, here’s the things that we have to do in the classroom to make that viable. And so we work with, again, subject matter experts both from industry and from education. And the education ones are education experts in that industry, right? So they’re not. Just about education. It’s about that industry.

Um, and so then we meet with them on a regular basis and we have a lead that goes through and helps with all of that, pulling it together, pulling the groups together. And that’s full-time work for 220 certifications. It, it’s a lot of work to keep those up to date. Um. You know, up until recently, you know, in technology keeping, uh, certifications up to date was difficult enough because typically we would update our technology certifications every year.

Um. We’re now trying to understand what that needs to be in the education space around AI now. And that’s one that ever a lot of people are really struggling with. And you gotta put it in context though, of the education system as well, right? So educators and, and students, they have semesters that go into these.

Right, and blocks of time, and I’ve got it. I have, as an educator, I have to prepare my content ahead of time. I have to lay that all out. I can build in some flexibility for new skills and new things that we’re learning. But it also has to fit within a framework so I know what my outcome is going to be.

On the backside of that, again, that becomes really important. So how to do that with how things are evolving so rapidly is a, is a question mark, but it follows the same process, right? It’s going to be group of experts sitting down just now in a much more rapid environment. To identify what are the skills that we can teach for a particular set of time, and then validate those skills and then evolve those skills or, you know, the standards and things for the next cohort and the next cohort and the next cohort so that it can be ongoing.

But yeah, we, it’s a pretty formal process that we follow pretty rigorous across the board. Um, very few groups can do it the way that we do because we’ve just set it up in a way that makes it very efficient and a cost effective.

Mason Pashia: That’s really helpful Um okay two more questions for you. So we’ve kind of invoked most of the stakeholders in this conversation. We talked a lot about learner value, what the learner gets out of this and their experience.

You just kind of mentioned both employers and educators in the same uh co-design co Uh Audit kind of process we haven’t talked about parents at all and in a lot of our work around real world learning and pathways like that’s often one of the hardest stakeholders to get on board because we’re essentially changing the messaging And I’m not saying you’re

I’m not trying to put words in your mouth but we’re sort of saying like college for all used to be Be the thing that everyone heard And increasingly that’s less and less what people are saying But there’s a lot of parents who still think like you saying oh your kid should maybe just get some certs They’re like, oh, you don’t think my kid can go to college? There’s like this, there’s this really tricky balance to to that. So how do you How do you think about I guess messaging the idea of aptitudes and certifications to parents and how do you get them on board with something like this especially at a state level like that’s a that’s a big swing.

Edson Barton | YouScience: It’s a big challenge, but it’s also, again, something that I’m really passionate about and, and I think that the answer is not as hard as it seems. Uh, connection to parents is always a challenge, uh, especially for a, for somebody like us who, uh, is coming in from the outside coming in.

Now we have a relationship with the state so we can access the SIS system and things like that. But the real goal is to, as you said, how do we get the parents on board with this? And the way that we found very easily to do that is to show parents what the students’ capabilities truly are. Parents rarely know those things.

Um, they know enough. But they don’t know all. So by starting at the place of a scientific evaluation of the student to say, here’s how Edson ticks, here’s how the way that Edson ticks actually aligns with careers in the market. And the, the beauty of this is. Everybody has natural aptitude and everybody has is great at something, you know, and so we can identify not just one job, but we can identify a whole host of different types of jobs that the student is naturally qualified to pursue.

And so that opens up the eyes of the parents a lot more than they ever have had access before. The next really important part to that is to show the pathway of progression. That starts with showing the end result. Your student has the capability to be, again, pick whatever it is, whether it’s welder or whether it’s civil engineered.

Typically, it’s both of those, quite honestly, because a lot of one of the misnomers. We all think on levels of surface level skills. I’m an accountant, I’m a welder. I’m a, I’m a football player. I’m a, you know, I’m a computer engineer. But the reality is, is what’s underneath those is what makes you good at those things.

I have aptitude and 3D visualization. I can understand numerical reasoning in this way. I see the world in this kind of context. Those aptitudes, that’s the aptitude level, then can be applied to a whole host of different careers that might be very relatable to one another. So, you know, being an engineer and being a welder are not at opposing sides of, of the equation.

They may be. Right there next to each other. So anyway, you show that end goal to somebody and say, here’s what’s possible. And then you show the pathway to achieve that. And typically where people get hung up, especially parents that are well educated, is they think, okay, if, if I help my, my student has high aptitude in, in, uh, manufacturing areas, and it could be various areas, I’ve always thought of manufacturing as dirty as this or whatever.

But if I can see that my, my student, my child has the opportunity to become X within manufacturing, which is at a high level that requires high level of education, that requires all these things, then all of a sudden I get this natural response of, ah, okay, if they go and get a first job as a manufacturing person, that’s on the line.

Right? It’s just base level wages. They start to realize, okay, I did that too, but I worked at a fast food restaurant and that had nothing to do with my future career. Now I can see that my student could actually go into these jobs at an earlier stage and continue to build skills in those areas that lead to this great career outcome.

And so I think showing the pathway becomes really critical for parents

Mason Pashia: I appreciate a lot of what you said today but I really like that we keep coming back to this kind of illuminating the path um metaphor It’s it’s both transparency for the learner it’s transparency for the employer it’s transparency for the educator and parents.

And it sounds like you all do this really effectively through stacking aptitudes and certificates and navigation that guidance uh you stack all of this really Well, I think my last question is I It’s it’s around recognizing that we live in a world that doesn’t have standards for a lot of things For example being a great sandwich maker that that is not something that you have a standards profile for It is a valuable lived experience that you’ve had but it is something that is really hard to represent with any fidelity anywhere Like you can put it on a resume but the referral is probably the only part of it that’s useful You can maybe your ears There is like oh it’s an indicator that they didn’t get fired Cool Um but like How are you thinking about that As you look at this stackable credentialing world and recognize that a learner only has X amount of time in a classroom and the rest of it they’re out learning doing other things everywhere else How do you kind of start to bring some of that into the picture to really complete this portrait of who a person is And aptitudes gesture at some of that like they gesture at what’s been honed over time and who they are But I’m just curious about that at the level of experiences had outside of the classroom away from standards How do we make that show up

Edson Barton | YouScience: Well the skills recognition movement, I think is a really critical movement, and it’s just at its infancy. I mean, we’ve been talking about it in, in certain circles for a long time. It’s been tried multiple times, but the technology has never been there to make it truly viable. To implement in a, in a sustained way.

So we are now at a place with technology where we can start to identify the individual skill level for all these different types of, of, of actions that I’ve taken or different roles that I’ve had. And so as we’re able to break those down better and better to become a sandwich maker, yeah, it. You look at it and you say, okay, well what did you really learn?

What’s valuable for me as a manufacturer? Right? What’s, what actually leads up to that? So breaking things down to that skill level becomes really critical. ’cause then we can start to pull out, okay, to become this technician in a manufacturing facility. You actually, you break those skills down. Now, which skills there actually relate to the skills of sandwich making, right?

And now you can start to build this, this identity around these things, and you can start to show people really clearly what you have. Now the missing piece there, which, uh, you know, we’re a part of, is how do you validate that that becomes, you know, kind of the, the, the holy grail of all of this is the validation of that because, you know, I can go on my resume and list.

All the things that somebody wants to hear, and then somebody could do a skills and do that. So the validation of those skills becomes kind of the next step. But I, I believe that we can accomplish that hurdle. And I think that we’re literally just a couple of years away from having a much more robust kind of nationwide skills map that we’ve typically had.

You know, with on net for example, we’ve, we’ve had these job level things. For quite some time and, and a basic job task analysis broken out. Now we’ve gotta break it down even further. And with AI we can do that and really make it robust. So I think that that’s kind of the next evolution, uh, to all of this experiences.

Mason Pashia: So, Edson Barton, thank you so much for joining me today. It was great to talk to you and congratulations on the exciting Utah News.

That’s very fun. Yep. I look forward to hear more in a year or so. So talk again soon.

Links

• Edson Barton LinkedIn
• YouScience
• What does a Community-Connected Career Readiness Program Look Like? | A Case Study with YouScience

Bio

Edson Barton is an accomplished entrepreneur with extensive experience in the fields of education and certification. As the CEO and Founder of YouScience | Precision Exams since May 2006, Edson has pioneered aptitude-based guidance and developed industry-recognized certifications to enhance post-secondary success and workforce skills. Previously, Edson served as CEO of ProCert Labs, focusing on standards validation for technical training materials, and as Director of Business Development and Publisher Sales at Certiport, where responsibilities included selling and developing certification programs for leading technology brands. Edson’s early career included a role as Executive Director of Kids Voting Utah, promoting civic engagement among youth. Educational background includes studies at Brigham Young University, Utah Valley University, and Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah.