Digital credentials and Learning and Employment Records (LERs) are powerful tools for advancing skills-based hiring and strengthening connections between education and employment. But despite growing interest, adoption has remained inconsistent across the ecosystem.
Two reports from 1EdTech examine why that gap persists and what organizations can do to move forward using technology and standards that already exist today.
Bridging the Gap: Aligning Education and Workforce Adoption of Digital Credentials
This report explores how employers view digital credentials and why many still rely on traditional signals like resumes and degrees when credential data is incomplete, inconsistent, or difficult to interpret.
Employers recognize the value of the richer skills data in digital credentials but often struggle to find, trust, or interpret this information in current hiring workflows. When credential data is unclear, inconsistent, or lacks validated evidence of skills, employers revert to familiar signals like degrees and resumes. To help, the 1EdTech community recommends a minimal, structured set of data elements that make credentials easier to understand, compare, and trust.
Building Seamless LER Systems: A Path to Scalable Credential Data Sharing
This report examines how credential data moves between education, employment, and job platforms, identifying interoperability challenges and outlining practical steps to improve scalable, standards-based data sharing across systems.
Many organizations use digital credentials to share verified skills and achievements, but inconsistent standards and disconnected systems make it difficult to share, update, and trust this data across platforms. Institutions often rely on a mix of standard tools and custom solutions, increasing complexity and limiting scalability. Instead of adopting new technologies, 1EdTech recommends building on existing standards and making targeted improvements to simplify sharing, verifying, updating, and using credential data in real-world hiring and education.
Key Findings Across Both Reports
Together, the reports highlight a common theme: employers value skills data, but inconsistent credential information and disconnected systems make it difficult to use at scale. The findings point to the need for clearer, more consistent credential data and stronger interoperability across education and workforce systems.
The reports conclude that the path forward does not require reinventing technology. Instead, progress depends on using existing tools and standards more consistently while addressing key gaps in data quality and system interoperability.
Recommended areas of focus include:
- Making credential data easier to find, understand, and compare
- Improving how systems exchange information without losing meaning
- Aligning how education providers and employers define and describe skills
- Establishing more consistent approaches for matching and verifying individuals across platforms