For Jake, the high school graduate applying for jobs, the application process shifts away from being agame of how to pick the perfect keywords for his resume. Instead, he is matched by the actual skillsacquired in his recent community college coursework and EdX certificate. Both Jake and the hiringmanager he will soon meet have a more equitable and accurate path through the noise of today’sonline hiring process.

integrationswith the mission-focused LER wallet companies or the entrance of a few general-purpose walletproviders, such as ApplePay or GooglePay, into the hiring ecosystem. Both Apple and Google arealready experimenting with housing digital driver’s license information for a number of U.S. states, andexpansion into storing digital credential information may be a viable, incremental step for them

One example of a curriculum data source is OpenSyllabus.org, a non-profit that hosts acomprehensive repository of higher ed course information. OpenSyllabus.org can serve as a value-added provider that sends skill information about specific college coursework to the parsers. This willexpand the potential skill information parsers can associate with a resume, going beyond what mightbe gleaned only from reading a course or degree title. They would now have access to informationderived from more detailed course catalog descriptions or even course syllabi information. Parserswill be able to send more extensive lists of skills over to companies’ HR platforms in a structuredformat they can immediately utilize. This integration also captures the skills from a particular type ofnon-degree credential - the coursework completed by the 40 million people in the U.S. who have somecollege, but no degree.

The lack of reliable and consistent information about non-degree credentials presented by candidatesin the hiring process also meant that workshop participants had no information to classify candidatespost-hire. This gap made it impossible to know who among the employee base had earned whichcredentials. Without this basic profile data, HR leaders are unable to gather much-needed insight intowhat types of credentials appear to prepare candidates best for a given role or which credentialsappear to be more effective at training than others

information about trainingcontent and skills was important, but only one aspect of how they determined if credentials wereof interest. They also wanted some understanding of the quality of the training. Some of the parsingcompanies have created scores that might help HR leaders understand credential quality, but theworkshop participants told us quite clearly that they didn’t like these kinds of scores. To them, scoringsystems felt very black box in nature and were generally not trusted.

Ideas for More Actionable InformationIn discussion with HR leaders helping imagine process improvement, we learned that the informationcurrently curated for digital badges was helpful, but perhaps not quite hitting the mark. Workshopparticipants told us two things about the kind of information found in Figure 9: it was overwhelming,and it missed key facts they wanted to know.In their view, the sum of information presented on badge websites is a bit dense and very focused onthe nature and content of the training

Stage Three: Expandingthe EcosystemLeverage new demand from end-usercompanies that have access to additionalinformation to justify more integrationsbetween data sources and HR tools

Northeastern University for its new primer on microcredentials written specifically for higher-ed leaders

check out the companion primer for human-resources or talent officials, which provides advice for evaluating the microcredentials that job applicants might present