The verdict is still out on skills-based hiring. While most employers still hire candidates with a degree—despite dropping such requirements—some colleges believe graduates need microcredentials to prove career readiness.
A public initiative may end the speculation for good.
Talent marketplaces are state-led employment ecosystems that centralize the skills learners acquire in school and at work. A $15 million Department of Education grant has dramatically boosted state infrastructure this year.
A key component is the Learning and Employment Record, or LER, which organizes a student’s resume by skill, rather than by completed courses and credentials.
University Business caught up with Amber Garrison Duncan, the “Godmother of LERs,” to better understand what federal and state participation in talent marketplaces means for higher education.
Duncan is executive vice president at the Competency-Based Education Network, a nonprofit organization advancing skills-based learning across education, government and industry.
During our interview, Duncan was attending the National Governors Association’s Skills in the States Annual Convening. At the event, public and national employers from 22 states discussed actionable strategies to sustain skills-based hiring practices in the wake of AI-driven labor market disruptions.
Note: This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Alcino Donadel: What do higher education leaders need to know right now about emerging talent marketplaces?
Amber Garrison Duncan: It really emphasizes a shift to what someone knows, what they can do and the different contexts in which they can do those things. It’s going to require institutions to not just disseminate knowledge, but help students do something with that knowledge.
That will push educators to shift assessments to capture evidence of a student’s performance, such as through simulations.
Nursing accreditors have very specific competencies and performance evidence types that they will assess, so you’re already starting to see quality assurance shift.
Donadel: It could have ramifications for how employers assess job applicants. How will talent marketplaces assist the job-seeker who didn’t attend an institution ranked highly by U.S. News and other publications?
Garrison: We’re going to see a lot of benefit for those folks, because it’s based on what they know and can do, not from where they learned it.
Employers now have a different way to look for talent. They can widen their aperture to recruit more talent from more places. This is a great equalizer.
More on skills-based education: Can microcredentials drive new demand for higher ed?
Donadel: It sounds like the talent marketplace, and LERs more specifically, are a more advanced transcript, one with more detail.
Duncan: I think that’s a fair way to say it. Really what we’re talking about is a place where students can store their verified skills and performance evidence, and aggregate that from all their different learning providers, from high school to community college to four-year university, or wherever that learning is occurring.
Donadel: How does the LER improve on transcripts?
Duncan: The transcript hasn’t always been clear in helping learners build toward their next education or employment opportunity. All an institution can see is a course title number and a grade, but the courses are different. We’ve tried common course numbering for a really long time, but that’s still the proxy for a set of learning outcomes.
LERs eliminate the proxies and specify students’ unique skills.
Donadel: What states and institutions are leading this talent ecosystem?
Duncan: The Alabama Talent Triad and Arkansas Launch are the first two state talent marketplaces in full production.
Other states are building through federal investments. California’s community college system is getting started on one thanks to a $20 million state investment.
The University of Central Oklahoma was an early institution that got involved with LERs. What they saw from students who owned their records was that they had better clarity about what they knew and could do, and they could talk to employers about that. The university experienced higher retention and completion rates.
Donadel: There are several components to the talent marketplace beyond LERs, including skills-based job description generators and credential registries. How do all these things work in tandem?
Duncan: This is about making a marketplace where people can find each other. We do it with farmers markets, the stock market and healthcare.
It’s all about reducing friction between residents trying to get access to jobs. Having all sides of the market present and involved is what’s been key.
Employers are getting flooded with AI-written resumes, and no one can tell who has what. Students need to have a record of their validated skills. LERs validate those skills.
On the flip side, employers sometimes forget to take down job posts, creating ghost jobs.
Our employers are saying they can’t find workers. Some of it is real, and some of it isn’t. The talent marketplace system can resolve these frictions through a governed forum.
States are building this as public infrastructure to build more trust than the private market could.
Donadel: Why is state and federal buy-in so important for the LER ecosystem?
Duncan: We’ve begun to scale really, really fast in the last eight months to a place that isn’t yet fully built. That’s created a sort of tension in understanding who’s doing what and to what end.
With states owning the infrastructure to produce the records, institutions only have to focus on providing learning and assessment and sending the data off, rather than having to buy a bunch of new stuff.
It’s that kind of thinking that is going to scale this project. Institutions will be provided a public tool so that they can preserve their missions.
