Extending the Transcript

Stage 3

Shifting from Stage 1 and Stage 2 to Stage 3 requires a commitment to access and high-quality learning experiences. Stage 3 is described as extended transcript lite (e.g., endorsements, awards, credentials, experiences mentioned on the second page of a transcript).

To transition to the later stages in the Credentialing Continuum, we must expand access for all learners, particularly those on the margins; expand value to both the learner and the workforce and expand experiences as a core component of both verifying skills and encouraging community connection.

Expanding Access

A credentialing and LER ecosystem has the potential to be an economic mobility engine. To make this a reality, it is critical to reduce friction in systems that have not worked for marginalized learners rather than starting with existing systems. This increased access is possible through formal durable skills requirements, documentation and validation platforms, and policy. A Credentialing Ecosystem promotes and increases access to real-world learning experiences for every student (either at school, region or state level) and maintains a high-quality level of these experiences. Portraits of Graduates exemplify how an organization can increase the focus on durable skills.

Validating Credentials

To ensure validity and reliability within proficiency determination on transferable competencies, a network of trust must exist within the system. Three levels of evaluation should be considered: Educator, Calibration, and External.

 

Learn More About Validating Credentials

While it may seem like a significant jump to get to a full LER ecosystem, as of 2024, roughly 20% of states (e.g., Indiana, New York, Ohio, Texas, Alabama and North Dakota)) have committed to adding new graduation requirements that include some combination of experiences or credentials that supplement a traditional high school transcript. Additionally, a handful of states, such as Alabama, North Dakota and Wyoming are piloting state-wide credential wallets to connect K-12, higher education and the workplace through a skills-based system.

While 82% of recently surveyed higher education institutions offer some Credit for Prior Learning programs, CPL is far less common (outside of normal transfer credit) in the secondary space. Additionally, CPL is most often applied for either previous course completion at other institutions or proxy assessments (such as IB, AP, CLEP, etc.). Recently, Western Governors University acquired Craft, a provider of apprenticeship and on-the-job training, which expands an already leading suite of CPL and job-embedded learning offerings.

Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS)

Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) is an innovative statewide initiative to set students up for success. This resource provides a rich dashboard and map of implementation throughout the entire K-12 experience. For example, in high school, Indiana GPS is committed to “expanding access to intentional college credit opportunities that allow students to earn transferable, stackable credentials before graduation, as well as high-quality work-based learning experiences.”

These credentials and experiences are in service of five key characteristics that “indicate a student’s preparation for success after high school.”

  • Civic, financial and digital literacy
  • Academic mastery
  • Career and postsecondary readiness (credentials and experiences)
  • Communication and collaboration
  • Work ethic

Ohio’s Graduation Seals

Ohio’s Graduation Seals are 12 diploma seals to help students demonstrate their academic, technical, and professional readiness for careers, college, the military, or self-sustaining professions. Each seal represents essential knowledge and skills for post-high school success, and students must earn at least two seals, including one state-defined seal, to show their readiness. These seals promote the development of critical skills that are valuable for students as they transition beyond high school.

Examples of Documentation and Validation Platforms

Adopting platforms that support the full shift to a credentialing and LER ecosystem is the second element to increase access. In an LER ecosystem, every learner will own and have access to their LERs, stored in a digital wallet, as a record of all cataloged learning experiences and skills credentials. This will allow them to grant permission to tailor their LER in support of talent transactions (i.e., enroll, enlist, employ) without requesting transcripts from registrars from each institution attended. 

This work is already underway, as represented by a handful of states that have already launched LER projects. The C-Lab is a Colorado-based lab that aims to “incubate and launch a statewide Colorado Learning Ledger and Skills Graph then publish a report for other states to implement similar 21st-century education and workplace infrastructures.” Alabama’s Talent Triad program and North Dakota’s digital wallet are other state pilot programs. Below are a few examples of LER technology solutions.

SOLO

The SOLO platform is designed to “create a positive impact by transforming how skills and credentials are recognized, validated, and utilized across industries.”

Greenlight Credentials

Greenlight Credentials is an ”advanced technology platform that simplifies records management and helps students and educational institutions navigate a student’s career-connected pathway by fostering meaningful connections through collaboration with schools, foundations, and communities.”

Territorium

Territorium’s LifeJourney is an “AI-powered, interoperable toolkit that enables students to take control of their digital credentials through personalized learning, assessments, and career opportunities with a data-rich, skills-based comprehensive learner record (CLR) with built-in badging capability.” Grand Valley State University (GVSU) uses Territorium to badge classes.

LearnCard

LearnCard by Learning Economy can issue, earn, store and share credentials, including IDs, Social Badges, Skills, Achievements, Work and Learning History. Through integration with more than 250 data streams and services, this tool is a comprehensive Learning & Employment Record (LER) ecosystem that provides effortless deployment of LERs, digital wallets, data clouds, analytics dashboards, and data integrations, bolstered by robust customization and support options. It is fully learner and employee-centered. 

Expanding Experiences

How do we know when a learner has had a valuable learning experience? Capturing context data about the sector, skills (core, technical, durable), duration and other connections of the experience and mapping it to skills developed/demonstrated that lead to credentials of completion is one way. Allowing experiences to serve as valuable, verifiable, and recorded evidence of skills and competencies acts as prerequisites for earning skills credentials, serving as proof of the proficiency demonstrated around durable/transferable, core or technical skills. 

How to Credential

To build capacity for an ecosystem-wide credentialing system, building blocks need to be in place—including articulating, designing, validating, badging and credentialing, documenting, and matching/aligning. Even with these elements established, a valid marketplace must exist for the earned credentials to best serve the individual learner.

Learn More About How to Credential

Historically, assessment has been biased, subjective and distorted into single-letter grades. With a rich credentialing ecosystem, removing some of this bias and subjectivity and increasing fidelity to evaluate actual learner skills is possible. Doing this well would require enormous data mobility and more transparency with personal data, but ultimately, it would serve the learner. In this process, it is critical to measure both the skills gained and the skills applied (experience) to ensure fidelity of the competency. These might be described as the following models: a “Skills Disconnect Model,” where skills are acquired void of context or direct application, an “Experiential Model,” where the model is rich with experiences but no connection to or measurement of skills, and a “Proficiency Model,” which excels in both experience and skills categories, making the skills transferable and the experiences specific and contextual.

Assessing Skills Within Experiences

These skills within these experiences can be assessed in various ways (Direct Assessment, Performance Assessment or Skill Extraction). A combination of these three approaches will surface in the emerging assessment landscape.

Direct Assessment

Employers seek candidates who not only possess technical skills but also exhibit transferable skills critical to job performance. However, they often lack the time to thoroughly evaluate these skills, underscoring the need for straightforward and reliable assessment systems. While many agree on these skills, the language and explanations must remain accessible. SHRM’s toolkit offers insights into a skills-first approach to hiring. 

  • Mursion: Uses immersive training simulations with human-powered avatars, allowing learners to practice difficult conversations and build impactful skills safely.
  • BodySwaps: Offers an immersive training platform that focuses on durable skills development and is accessible via VR, PC, and mobile devices.
  • AstrumU: Uses AI and machine learning to create validated skills profiles by compiling data from a learner’s education, credentials, and employment history. This skills extraction concept provides an alternative to directly assessing durable skills (or technical and core skills).

In the education sector, Education Design Lab uses the predetermined algorithms in a virtual reality online learning platform (VSBL) to assess a set of durable skills, including critical thinking, collaboration and creative problem-solving. It involves co-designing and validating micro-credentials with input from institutions and employers.

Performance Assessment 

In 2022, Data Quality Campaign reported that nearly a dozen states had begun transitioning to “through-year assessments.” Through-year assessments, or progress monitoring systems, combine ongoing interim and traditional summative assessments into a unified structure. Interim assessments provide timely, actionable feedback to teachers and families, enabling them to support students’ learning in real time. At the end of the year, students receive a final summative score that informs students and satisfies accountability requirements. Key advantages include faster results, more valuable data for adjusting instruction and a focus on growth. States, including Alaska, Georgia and North Carolina, have leveraged federal money to establish these systems and others, including Texas and Virginia, have established these systems through legislation. 

Efforts in evaluating skills include public initiatives that pioneered this shift towards performance assessments (critical structures to evaluating durable skills). While these efforts primarily addressed standards, they emphasized the need for more authentic assessment.

  • New York Performance Standards Consortium (NYPAC): The NYPAC is a comprehensive and long-standing Performance Assessment Consortium. Teacher and learner-directed learning experiences, professional development, performance assessment tasks, and external/internal validation via rubrics across all discipline areas.
  • California Performance Assessment Collaborative (CPAC): This California initiative convenes educators, policymakers, and researchers to develop authentic assessments that support student learning. CPAC uses performance assessments, such as projects and portfolios, to measure applied knowledge and 21st-century skills.
  • Performance Assessment of Competency-based Education (PACE): New Hampshire’s PACE focuses on deeper learning through a competency-based approach. It blends local, common and state-level assessments to promote critical knowledge and skills.
  • Performance Assessment Resource Bank: Hosted by Envision Learning Partners, the resource bank is a database of performance assessment examples built through a collaboration of the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE), the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC), Envision Schools, Summit Public Schools and others.

Skill Extraction

According to Peter Janzow of Credly, “Tasks are increasingly the language of work—how people define work and jobs and roles, the relationship with tasks and skills, proficiency levels of skill related to particular jobs and job roles at particular levels.” He went on to share that this level of tasks is also where we see humans being replaced and augmented by machines. A clear articulation of skills helps select the right person and machine for the task. 

Platforms like LivedX and CompetencyGenie are creating products that allow students to submit learning experiences and have an AI tool extract the number of valuable skills, reducing the administrative burden of these tasks. When coupled with verification, this AI-enabled extraction and identification of skills becomes a valuable tool for matching candidates and communicating proficiencies. “Skills can be described in meta-data using AI and triangulation with a variety of experiences to confirm/verify that you have a particular proficiency in a particular skill,” said Meena Naik of Jobs for the Future (JFF). 

Solid Project enables the credentialing of military experiences by converting them into badges. These badges, which represent skills learned, are stored in a digital wallet. The credential provider, who offers these experience-based badges, verifies the individual based on their Joint Services Transcript (JST) which documents their military training. They also ensure that the metadata attached to each badge aligns with civilian manufacturing standards.

A more accurate learner proficiency profile emerges through a combination of direct skills assessment, embedded performance assessments and skills extraction.

Signaling Valuable Experiences

In addition to skills assessment, increasing the signals of valuable experiences also leads to expanded opportunities. 

Real World Learning

The Real World Learning (RWL) initiative in Kansas City consists of a regional set of agreements called “Market Value Assets.” Participating districts aim to graduate all students with at least one of these assets. These assets are entrepreneurial experiences, client-connected projects, internships, college credit and industry-recognized credentials. This regional understanding increases employer readiness and student access and creates a flurry of regional activity. The shared definitions empower learners to document and capture their ability to apply skills in context. 

New York City Seal of Civic Readiness

New York City Seal of Civic Readiness is an official acknowledgment that a student has achieved a high level of proficiency in civic knowledge, skills, mindset, and experiences. This distinction on a high school transcript and diploma indicates the student’s understanding and commitment to participatory government, civic responsibility, and civic values. It also demonstrates to universities, colleges, and future employers that the student has completed a civics or social justice action project, highlighting the importance of civic engagement and scholarship. 

The Kentucky Civil Seal

The Kentucky Civil Seal can be earned at all grade levels when a student “exhibit[s] their understanding, application, and reflection upon local, state, and national governance; commitment to democratic principles and promoting the common good; informed participation in civic spaces and reflection upon their role in modern civic life.”

Colorado Seal of Climate Literacy

Colorado Seal of Climate Literacy requires meeting minimum high school graduation requirements, taking two environment-related courses and completing a self-directed experiential project that emphasizes real-world skills development.

Expanding Value

For incentives to receive and award credentials, first they must be valued by employers, higher education and the recipients themselves (i.e. a student showcasing a skill credential with a record of experiences to increase the probability of higher education admission/success or hiring). This more accurate skills-based assessment of talent benefits employers through quicker hiring, keeping new employees out of work for shorter periods of time, and reducing retraining costs. In 2020, Laffer Associates’ research estimated that a shift to verified and validated LERs would provide aggregate gains to the U.S. economy of more than $400 billion.

According to Meena Naik, JFF and formerly of the University of North Texas, value is increased when we apply skills to tasks, meaning a skill in isolation signifies less than when connected to an experience. Take communication, for example… “what does communication look like for a business organization versus a finance organization? There’s a lack of that context and that data. That’s the data that can live in these credentials.”

Another benefit of credentialing is that students with valuable real-world and work-based learning experiences have increased confidence and often increased success in finding opportunities after (and before) graduation. Naik continues, “We’re hedging our bets on the person receiving the credential, finding value in it. And it increases their self-efficacy. It increases their resilience. And we saw this. We saw it in GPA increases. We saw it in persistence. We saw a stronger likelihood of people returning to their degrees because they were getting these things and starting to see the real-life applicability and all of the things they’re actually learning.” This research (and here) was conducted at the University of North Texas. 

In addition to credentials boosting confidence and self-efficacy, the experiences offer a similar boost. The Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) Network is a national network of programming that immerses high school and higher education students in a “professional culture, solving real-world problems, using industry-standard tools and are mentored by actual employers, all while receiving high school and college credit.” In a recent report on alumni satisfaction, learners expressed high increases in overall confidence, resilience, self-knowledge and collaboration through the professional experiences they participated in. (See below).

Credentialing the skills gained in these valuable learning experiences and capturing these experiences so that they can be easily recorded, verified and communicated will increase value for all learners.

From the CAPS Report

Education Systems Communicating Experiences

Riipen

Riipen is a higher education work-based learning platform that hosts client projects for universities. Students conduct projects framed by business partners and receive detailed feedback from employers and educators, which include skill verification and Achievements awarded to students based on project category, industry, action, frequency, and other factors. Riipen learners report enhanced confidence and skill application, critical thinking and growth of a professional network. Employers cited a 78% growth in business efficiency and innovation and a 66% improvement in their talent development pipeline. Perhaps most importantly, each additional learning experience through the Level UP program increased the likelihood of receiving an employment offer by 19%, validating the idea that more experiences equals more value to employers. 

The NAFTrack Diploma

The NAFTrack Diploma is an employability credential that signals to employers that a learner has demonstrated job readiness. Learners in the 620 NAF career academies earn the diploma by completing the pathway curriculum and conducting a 120-hour internship with skills verification by a workplace supervisor. According to their website, “78% of NAF students that participated in a work-based learning experience indicated it helped them build career skills.”

LivedX

LivedX is a platform that allows learner experiences (client projects, classes, etc.) to stack into a certificate in aggregate. Once the certificate is gained, it can be exchanged for college credit, resulting in real value for the learner. This college credit is currently provided by the University of Colorado Denver. This credit also helps expand enrollment pathways for universities as many look at dropping enrollment demand in the upcoming school years. 

Businesses Communicating Experiences

IBM

IBM has been focused on the development and credentialing of new technology skills for over a decade – including the launch and development of the P-TECH model. In conversation with Lydia Logan, Vice President, Global Education and Workforce Development, Corporate Social Responsibility at IBM, she shared updates to their Skills Build platform to reflect global trends. In this shift, IBM commits to training millions of people in AI, green skills and other areas by 2030, emphasizing the importance of credentials for workforce development. This platform increases the chances that employees will upskill and stay competitive in the rapidly changing job market. By eliminating the four-year degree hiring requirement at IBM, diversity increased in their applicant pool.

AT&T

AT&T employees completed more than 2.6 million online upskilling courses since a 2018 retraining initiative started, earning more than 174,000 certifications. Additionally, employees are increasingly “able to immediately apply their new skills to existing positions or transition into a new role,” according to the company, which says 40 percent of the 40,000 jobs filled at the company in 2016 were filled with candidates found internally. ATT recently introduced nanodegrees in Data Science and Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Programming and Development, Android Developer and iOS Development.

Velocity Network

Velocity Network connects more than 80 human resources and education companies looking to pioneer an open credential skills-based market, facilitating a variety of improvements that make the navigation of the career landscape easier for individuals. The network believes that “this data will be stored in individual career wallets, essentially digital CVs controlled directly by employees and students themselves, with data stored on their own devices or by their trusted wallet provider.” This data can then be shared by the owner with prospective employers and/or educational institutions.

Google

Among many upskilling offerings within Google’s suite of resources, Grow with Google boasts great results both within Google’s own hiring and external organizations. A recent survey shows that 75% of program graduates report a positive career outcome (e.g. a new job, promotion, or raise) within six months of completion. The Google Career Certificate Program offers online, on-demand training in fields like data analytics, project management, IT support, UX design, digital marketing, and cybersecurity. These certificates are used in colleges, universities, and high schools and are recognized by many employers as valuable credentials. The American Council on Education (ACE) recommends these certificates for college credit, allowing high school students to earn college credits. Google’s employer consortium posts jobs directly to Grow with Google job boards, making it easier for certificate holders to find relevant job opportunities. Google also integrates AI essentials training with career certificates to keep learners updated with the latest technological advancements. Learn More.