Young people can start building their digital passports early – as soon as they start high school.
Skills – digital and non-digital – are what drive the economy. Employers need skilled workers, and skilled workers command jobs with higher pay and benefits. Highest in demand are digital skills, which are increasingly needed in every employment sector, including traditional manufacturing.
But it’s hard to test for digital skills. Researchers recognize these skills aren’t isolated competencies you develop through short courses or teaching yourself to use a program for work. Digital skills are “interdependent in practice,” and require a new form of measurement.
One way to do this is with a digital passport — a central record where skills competencies can be documented, and to which job-seekers can give employers access. A digital passport could verify skills, and use artificial intelligence to do the grunt work that translates skills into competencies that interest employers.
So how might a digital passport work?
Start documenting digital skills in high school
Young people can start building their digital passports early – as soon as they start high school. Each student could access the shell of a digital skills passport from grade 9, logging into an online CV similar to LinkedIn, but with a lot more functionality.
As they gain competencies and credentials, their supervisors, teachers, managers, course leaders, or educational institutions will verify what they’ve achieved and update the passport. This verification could be in the form of badges, microcredentials (industry-recognized, skill-specific certifications, usually ‘micro’ courses), licenses, degrees and apprenticeships. It will be a living document that showcases exactly the types of skills employers demand.
Hopefully, the digital skills passport would motivate students to gain the experience, competencies and credentials future employers recognize and value. The passport could include work samples; video snippets of the passport holder demonstrating particular skills; and the cumulative number of hours spent learning, refining, demonstrating and refreshing those skills. The passport would include employability skills as well as technical skills.
I believe such a digital passport would encourage students to develop a razor-sharp focus on skills and a hunger to apply them in real-world situations. They’d see the relevance of their learning, and keep an eye on the skills their prospective employers value, motivating them to prepare for the future.
The original skills passport
Of course, the registered apprenticeship program has been documenting skills for years, and could be front-and-center in a discussion about creating a universal digital skills passport for both on- and offline competencies. These learn-while-you-earn programs have been a talent pipeline for companies of all sizes just about everywhere in the world.
A registered apprentice qualification functions as a skills passport because – in most cases – the competencies are nationally recognized. And those skills mean something. People who successfully complete apprenticeships earn $300,000 more (including benefits) over their work-life than their peers who didn’t get a college degree, according to a Mathematica study.
Apprenticeship has been supported by both Democratic and Republican Presidents, including the current Administration. President Biden will expand apprenticeships, youth apprenticeships, and pre-apprenticeships with the National Apprenticeship Act of 2021, expected to pass Congress with bipartisan support. Once law, it will create one million new apprenticeship opportunities.
Having a demonstrably successful, credential-based program such as apprenticeship means we don’t have to start from scratch. We have a workable model of setting nationally recognized, transferable credentials that include both technical and employability skills.
Powering up verification with the Credential Engine
Some people are already developing a systematic, online system to document credentials across the U.S. The Credential Engine is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing credibility and coherence to the vast network of credentials in the U.S. Already, Credential Engine has listed almost a million unique, recognized credentials. These include secondary school diplomas, apprenticeship programs, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers, non-academic providers, and post-secondary educational institutions.
On the Credential Engine website, you can search for credentials, organizations, assessments, learning opportunities, competency frameworks, and pathways. The site does not yet filter for discrete skills, but that might just be too granular for its business model. I’d suggest, though, that the Credential Engine is doing crucial groundwork for the concept of a digital skills passport. Importantly, the “engine” is helping to recognize and verify courses, qualifications, apprenticeships and competencies across the US. It’s possible their verification system could eventually be used internationally, which would bring us a step closer to a global digital skills passport.
Google, Microsoft, Walmart, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and the Lumina Foundation are among the Credential Engine’s founders. Their interest in documenting credentials underscores how employers everywhere are looking for skilled workers, and often struggling to find them.
A digital skills passport that showcases recognized, verifiable skills could help employers spot job-ready talent for positions they haven’t been able to fill. It could also encourage the next generation of workers to start focusing on skills as early as high school, and develop habits of lifelong learning.
