 Moderating our panel this morning on competencies and credentials as currency will be Mark Singer from Thomas Edison State University. Panelists include Dave Wilcox, president and CEO of Global Skills Exchange. We have John Dyer from American Association of Community Colleges and Danny King from Accredible. So please welcome. Well we're going to continue on with the same, I guess we have the same title as what Joanne was just talking about, right? But I don't know if there's how much connection. We're not going to do any linguistic analysis of any of the terms as far as I know because that was it was covered really well. Thank you for that. So my name is Mark Singer. I'm at it is up there at Thomas Edison State University which is an institution that's focused entirely on adult and non-traditional learners and I just wanted to talk from them. Each of the panels will have a chance to talk about his perspective on what we're doing here. But I did want to say something like you know so far in this in this summit which I think has gone really well there's been a lot of great questions from the audience and I would encourage you to ask some of us if any come to mind. But there's been especially a lot of discussions about access and diversity and equity in the last couple days and we thought it was important to you know sort of address the elephant in the room which is that we are you know to look at us not the most diverse group but I should mention that well there's there's one good thing is that you know I've pulled the other panels here and it turns out we're entirely bias-free all of us so I think you'll get a wide range of... it's not good right? And the other thing is that we come from very different perspectives to this subject and so we disagree on just about everything so I think that'll that'll really be interesting and feel free to call us out for whatever strikes your fancy. That seemed like it would be worth mentioning that so with that in mind I just want to talk about my briefly my perspective and then well the panelists will each explain something about where they're coming from on this. So Thomas Edison State University traditionally has done a lot of work in the field of prior learning assessment assessing what students already know and in our case mapping that to our curriculum and our courses. So a few years ago we realized that that course-based model presented a real challenge a serious challenge for a lot of our students because they would know some things but not everything that would go into you know the intro to calculus course they might know the first two-thirds of it or in another situation they might know the practice that was underlying a particular course but not the theory you know and so we would say to them well you don't know all of it you're not getting any credit you'll have to start from the beginning and so from that we realized that well we could provide students with modules or materials that would help them supplement what they already know so that's how we got involved in open educational resources and that's how we discovered the the folks here at the Sailor Academy as well so we worked with them on a lot of projects like like that the idea was to sort of fill in the gaps in students learning and that really raised the question for us like why are three credit courses the measure of a student's knowledge and the student at the measure of a student's progress toward a degree and then we were like well why degrees also you know so we started thinking about who our students were and our students overwhelmingly in all of our surveys always say I'm here because I want to either move up in my career or change my career entirely a few of them say oh you know the satisfaction of having a degree but they're you know that's not really true and it's maybe just to impress their kids you know but that's really it but most of them overwhelmingly are thinking about career pathways so then it really we realized if that's the case it didn't really matter which course they were taking anyway what was really important for our students was do they have this set of skills that a degree was supposed to represent you know so my background's history so it didn't really we realized that you know there aren't many history majors at my school and and it didn't matter if they took 17th century history 18th century history diplomatic history as long as I was able to teach them what the tools of the historian were and how to use them and so with that in mind we realized well if we're compiling this set of tools or helping students compile this ability to use this set of tools right students really ought to be able to to earn interim credentials on the way to that degree goal you know like certificates badges things like that so they ought to be able to to apply what they know right away while they're working toward their degrees and almost all of our students are part-time so a lot of them are on the eight-year plan or something like that so so this all that I just described to you was like a total revelation to us you know and so we start talking to people about this idea of like you know like little credentials like badges or something like that and then it turns out that through various other pathways everyone else was already there you know so so for us it was this revelation in in in our higher ed sector but but everyone else here I think on this panel has come to this similar conclusion in a very different you know from a very different direction and we all have in common I think our interest in in these alternative credentials but what you'll hear today I think is is a little bit about how those different pathways that we've taken have affected the way we think about these things now so with that in mind I just like to allow the panelists to to talk a little bit about who they are what their perspective is on this and might as well start with Danny since you're right next to me great hi everybody can you all hear me cool I'm the co-founder and CEO of accreditable and so we're a digital badging and digital certification platform so I guess I'm coming at this from the sort of technological lens also you know we have about 450 customers and so lots of them are universities lots of them are associations lots of them are running online courses like Udacity and things like that and so I get to see I'm really lucky I think I get to see all these very different lenses of what different types of organizations are thinking about these kind of topics so I'll try and represent those as best as I can you know the way that the I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to provide both the technological foundation for a lot of the things we're talking about but also the the cultural foundation too you know it's not just a tech problem it is also about how does one evaluate these and whether or not people actually do want to evaluate these is the challenge you know whether or not imply employers are even considering things like badges and microcredentialing so we're kind of looking at it from those those two lenses okay I'm Dave Wilcox with Global Skills Exchange actually my background is in engineering so I tend to look at things through an engineering perspective I'm looking for rational structure and I remember about six years ago we had a meeting in Washington from people that were came together to talk about credentialing and talking about what some needs were and the and one of the persons at the meeting put up a PowerPoint showing all these intertwined lines have you seen that you probably seen that picture it looked very very complex and so the question was it's the the obvious thing from an engineering standpoint is to say well look at all of this confusion and chaos in this marketplace but the more I've gotten involved in this work the more chaotic it is in other words maybe that chart is the right way to look at things and not try to get straight lines everywhere to make everything perfectly rational but to see the value in the complexity if it's effectively used and provides value to individuals and of course to employers and I'm going to take the term of currency and by the way the presentation just in today I keep changing my my notes here a little bit because it had a lot of new perspectives and insight that I hadn't thought about so I hope this is coherent the one of the things that but that actually came out of that and extended throughout the last the last few years as even though they might be a common definition of currency in some cases is a way of describing credentials in some kind of way that makes sense to the complexity of the marketplace and so that the thoughts were in this and we were engaged with the the corporation for skill workforce with aluminum funding looking at at what is a credential and essentially very simply it's a package of competencies organized or packaged or framed in certain ways but there weren't really a common ways of really talking about that or describing we looked at what Europe had done and they had come up with a scale approach to degrees are here other types of credentials lesser I threw that in sorry other kinds of credentials are at different levels but reality when we looked at the underlying competency it's the underlying credential itself the unit of analysis was at the competency level if we can articulate those or think about those with a common framework or a common way of of describing then the credential is weak because its foundation is weak so this this led to the development of something called the credential framework which is look excuse me well it's credential framework I call it comps a framework but it's credential framework saying that all credentials and competencies that really are the underlying value of the credential are an aggregate of knowledge skills and what we call personal and social skills in other words the competency really is an aggregate it's not one or the other some might be more important in certain competencies than others but really it's the aggregate and we developed a a scale model to help people think that through and we have found there's no perfect way of describing this because of the high variation of the way people think the context of different sectors and employer priorities but we believe that this does add and contribute to improved signals of the credential because the demand side which is where more my focus is really on is the demand side is looking for quality signals they don't have to agree with them or think they're good but they need to know what the signals are so they can make make judgments we happen to be doing quite a bit of work for the Department of Defense it's one of our bigger bigger clients and we've learned a lot there as well that that feeds back into my thinking about about the supply side that they they have a concept called readiness you might have heard that it means that the goal is to get everyone at a ready state to support mission so it means when I'm in a certain situation and I call on you to perform the function you know what you need to know you need to know at the right time you need to be able to apply in the right context getting to that place has been the challenge and but that's that's what they do and they think about this and we're looking right now at the whole cyber arena a little bit and saying that people can learn about cyber probably every college in the country has a cyber program it's a big-demand area and a lot of people want to take courses in cyber there are several certifications come to you has one and others have have actually certifications in fact we help DOD build a certification structure for the use of those certifications but we just talking we just talking to the army armies not happy I don't really care whether they've had a degree or sort of is I want to know can a person perform that function effectively in a live fire environment meaning to me that there is then a question here of what the signals mean not in in in the generality of signals but the signals in the specific context and so and I think that suddenly they say well we had this competency but the competency I have a great golf swing there is no I mean every every instructor I've ever had say you've got that technique right oh I should be credential it doesn't play out in context unfortunately I mean my scores are not very good when when I actually have to actually do it it's a very different story so the way I look at this is in this ecosystem there are multiple players all bring value and the quality of the signals that make the demand side which really is the one that judges value in their context have the right kind of signals that they can make effective judgments about we'll get but I will move I will move some other thoughts maybe later because otherwise otherwise I'll have no questions to ask yeah I'm no question I was gonna I was gonna answer them all in front so hopefully yeah and so we should John sorry good morning I know I come at this from two perspectives on the one hand I'm the director of workforce and economic development at the American Association of Community Colleges which is the membership organization for roughly 1100 two-year degree granting institutions across the country from from my formal hat perspective I care about students getting family sustaining wage jobs and keeping them full-time that's what I care about from an additional perspective I have spent the last couple of years working with corporation for a skilled workforce and in particular with Susan Lupo whom you heard from yesterday on a project called the right signals that project is funded by Lumina Foundation and it was based on a pretty simple premise there is as we all know a plethora of credentials out there degree certificates badges licenses etc etc etc what we wanted to look at with a small cohort of colleges moving fast and doing good work was how the colleges and the credentials could send the right signals about what those credentials meant to three audiences audience number one employers audience number two the institutions themselves between and among colleges audience number three the students can the student actually articulate what the hell this piece of paper or this badge means about what they know and about what they can do and so we were very fortunate to be able to set this up as a sandbox we took an open application process we picked or I should maybe I shouldn't say we picked 20 colleges distinguished themselves in the process that were then selected to participate over a period of 18 months and unlike most projects we were not prescriptive we said you must do two things number one you must try out this thing you must beta test this thing called the credentials framework you'll love it it's a four-page fold out it looks really awesome and current and you must map at least one credential to a degree or certificate you must lay out what the competencies are and so we had 20 very different approaches and 20 different things that people were trying to do everything from trying to use competency mapping credentials as part of guided pathways to laying out entire programs for an industry to one school that was doing competency mapping across humanities courses you name it all kinds of things so that's really the other lens that I bring this we're just wrapping up the project now but we've seen amazing things and are anxious to go on and do a second round with perhaps another set of colleges perhaps some of the same stay tuned that's great so as I mentioned before yet we're all sort of converging on this from a number of different perspectives I guess we have some poll questions we should probably ask them right we went to the trouble of Jackie type them out so the first one's really easy like you'll know the answer to this for yourself right away it's over here somewhere but just it would give us a sort of a better read on the room and it's it takes a minute now we all right we'll stall all you know all right there it is and it's in the app if you have the app and it basically oh some people have already voted have have you yourselves you know earned an alternative credential of some sort or other and I think we talked about this a little bit yesterday but it's actually well man what's tied all right so half the room has half the room hasn't I would presume that even the ones of you who have not are familiar with how these things work in some ways though right we'll hear about different approaches to this different types in a minute all right the nose are we're starting to win all right so it's roughly even thank you so so I guess the question I had since there is this convergence you know when I like I said when we got to that space we realized though a lot of people were already there and we're not as smart as we thought we were but where I would I'd like to ask the panel is where do you see this demand for alternative credentials coming from like what's what's driving it I mean weren't colleges and universities already doing a good enough job of credentialing people that we didn't really need these things at all I'll jump on that one if you'd like so the community college perspective is a little bit different perhaps from the perspective of a four-year degree institution or a terminal degree institution because there are so many programs that one might classify as career technical education that's where credentials traditionally have lived more and there are the ones we all know but in order to become a nurse it is not simply enough to have graduated with an associate's degree in nursing one needs also to pass the NCLEX and become licensed as a nurse that's a sort of the classic example of a credential if you wish to become a welder you may well take welding classes but you will probably need to take the AWS exam and possibly the ASME exam if you wish to weld pipe etc etc etc many community colleges have reached the conclusion that every degree or certificate that's offered ought to be complemented by an industry recognized credential and I use that term very deliberately a credential I would argue needs to be industry recognized or what is the otherwise you're just pushing a rope and I really feel pretty strongly with the question was asked earlier about the credential explosion I would argue that the answer that was missing no disrespect intended was employers demanding them that's what will cause the explosion will be employers demanding these credentials and understanding what they mean I think so I talked with a lot of recruiters we're doing a bunch of market research that are credible and we're launching you know verification products and trying to connect people's credentials to actual employment opportunities so I think I interviewed something like 60 or 70 recruiters recently and one message and this was across you know white collar blue collar you know high-tech low-tech mostly folks on the US though and one message I got loud and clear was that generally you know they are looking for something like a degree as a baseline requirement and I think that is starting to change though because in especially in smaller companies there were a lot more open-minded about what credentials you had as this sort of baseline requirement you know the bigger ones you need to have a degree or maybe you need to have done the GRE or something like that and they won't even interview you until you've done that but a lot of the smaller ones you know if you're hiring a programmer and you've done a coding bootcamp instead of you know gone to a degree granting institutions to do it there are a lot more open-minded about that I think we're just at the very beginning of that starting to change but you know a message I got loud and clear was that look we need you to have this certain baseline sort of low like low bar that you need to first cross and a degree is a nice and easy way to do that but then they don't really care about the content of that degree they want to sit you down and interview you or maybe train you up themselves because they each look at it so differently so I think there is appetite for something higher resolution than I have a degree and there is also appetite for finding those you know I heard the phrase diamonds in the rough a few times you know and think you know there is open-mindedness but there is a problem I kept coming up against which was nobody's ever gonna get fired for hiring you know an MIT graduate even if the MIT graduate was terrible at their job right but you would get fired if you hired someone from some random but coding bootcamp and so there is a risk implied and we need to find a way I think to get around you know that risk did you want to comment I'm just looking at from a little a different point of view the getting someone to the point of where they are credentialed for employment and in my view of this is about a third of the game there are far more people employed than are unemployed that's a gigantic market of people that will benefit from multiple forms of credentials so employment is just a beginning point it seems to me and colleges many colleges take it to the point of getting the degree the issue is people trend transverse many different career paths and I'm sure many of us have been and we need access to new learning new forms of degrees Deloitte just said that the average person has one percent of their work time available for learning that's 20 hours a year so how does how does our credentialing community serve what I think is this lifelong need in some way and I think that's where alternative models alternative credentials have to be a piece of the total picture not to replace the the foundational but to take it to full value like one short example I was a licensed professional engineer 45 years ago I haven't done engineering in 35 years I still have the credential I put on my wall I think you see it on my wall up there yet I'm very proud of it it cost me $5,000 $200 every two years the problem is it doesn't mean anything it's a bit of a fraud actually for me to even have it now in the new world at the time I deserved it I give me credit for that but the world has changed it's no longer sufficient and can the and the community of a credentialers and an extra credential providers look at complex and many forms of ways of enhancing me or others throughout there so I guess thank you but this this leads me to something that I don't want to make this just about the things I'm interested in but does this suggest that higher ed's not really responding to the evolving market fast enough I mean if we're if we're having these credentials out there that we have stood behind and yet they're not they don't have the meaning that we wanted them to have I mean I thought about that yeah okay the original movement in 89 towards it certifications were written by a friend of many years at that time department said an alternative up universe at that time in that 89 paper Cliff wrote that talked about the parallel universe that certification will become a way around what it perceived at the time as being characterized by the way you just characterized now a response to the market since then there's been a proliferation of certifications five to ten thousand and more every day part of that's driven by what was seen as the right answer some work and some don't work but I think it's in a search it's a search for a tighter relevancy between the providers of credentials and the users and there are issues on both sides so I think certification became a response in many cases to what was seen as a a slowness of education to respond to the marketplace but that was an 89 that was yes it was driven by it which was that time emerging occupational area but then it came to be seen as the instrument and it is a useful and important instrument but not the only forms of credentialing so that's just far too much red meat for me to pass out okay I think the risk when we use a term like higher ed is we imply some sort of great homogeneous mass that all thinks and does the same thing Western Governors University is not Edison State is not Miami-Dade Community College is not a small tribal college in Northern Oklahoma high you know we say where the American Association of Community Colleges we say that all of our college we love all our colleges equal they're they're all members and each of them is special like their children they're special all in their own way and they are but suggest that higher ed moves in some kind of group think or in some unified way I think it's just not the reality so at a community college you would be hard-pressed to find a program of study that did not have an advisory board made up of representatives from industry who advise on curriculum and advise on instruction and who in many cases offer work-based learning opportunities whether those internships apprenticeships etc etc etc now do the quality of some of those advisory boards vary from program to program in school to school sure but I suspect for example if you're go on to the campus of a four-year school and ask to meet with the advisory board for a program you might get some more blank looks than you might at a community college so I think I think it's just a danger in that homogeneity they're very different approaches based on different needs and based on different missions yeah yeah yeah just add to that you know we we work with something like 60 or 70 universities issue badges all certificates all both and they all have completely different ideas about what a bad should be for versus the certificate versus you know how high stakes one should be versus the other and yeah so there is no homogene in in higher education I think generally not a bad thing as well but we are trying to force these standards a lot of the time and you know there is there is tension there I think yeah well that is that's another question I had prepared ahead of time right there is is so if there is this kind of emergence of different kinds of standards serving different kinds of purposes originating different places is there any danger of these this explosion credentials was that revolution thank you all right that's a little cleaner will that lead to more confusion you know about what what skills represent or you know how do you should we be working toward a common standard or is it okay for it just to represent different things to different people in different situations oh man yeah so I'm an engineer by background and I would love a standard I love standards I was there trying to solve that gear problem and you know but it does seem currently that we're a little too early for it but I think that we will get to something like that over time but what I think we'll need is I'm sure Dave can talk at length about this of course is we're gonna have a basic standard and that will be the sort of basis but then each organization and also each individual will have a very different narrative about what each course meant to them what that means they can do for an employer and I think it's quite important the individual controls a lot of the narrative about what they feel they can do and how they feel they can prove that and so I think we need to put a lot of the the sort of tooling in the hands of the individuals and to a lesser extent in the institutions as well and try and standardize less you know we're a one-size-fits-all program and more okay well this is like the basics that we can guarantee someone will have and let them communicate oh and that meant that this person will excel at this a couple of examples you know what I love to give is me versus my co-founder Alan he's our CTO I'm the CEO both went to the same school Durham University in the UK same course computer science graduated with actually almost exactly the same grade same piece of paper but we have opposite skills and you have to literally sit us down and interview us to try and figure out the difference between us but if I could you know make my own narrative on my credential itself I think that would be different going a little further you know before I went to college I actually did not do very well in in a few of my subjects in math was a big one and if you want to do computer science in the UK we have very rigid you know college applications process you can only apply to about six schools it's like a government regulated system there's really not a lot of getting around it and I just didn't get the grades I needed to go to the school I wanted to go Durham I kind of hustled my way in anyway and I more or less failed math I got like a Dean math it was really bad but then I graduated top of my class in computer science and so you know the resolution that we're judging kids by is very low you know it's like we think that if you take this really standardized course then you'll have the ability to do these other things on average on on average that is true but how many people are exactly on that median and I think we need a much higher resolution image of like well this person actually can demonstrate you know that they can do this so let's let's take a chance on them just have a quick thought on it I think the employer demand signal is it is it is problematic to some degree the because the signals come from people who are in all there are many good things by the way so I'm not being overly critical what we're trying to do is take it one step further the interface of demand is not at the HR office or the employment office it's at the business process level and functional level if we can correlate and relate competency to risk to successful business process successful operational processes then we have a clear value-driven signal like if I know that particular skill is would introduce high risk if it's not sufficient to a particular business objective then I relate that as my demand signal and some aggregation be necessary to that's I think that's getting to the resolution question yeah a couple of quick points there's a certain tension for a community college because on the one hand a community college is obliged to prepare students for jobs that are available in the community and cut the colleges of the community and is expected to serve the community so on that basis the credentials that they offer should and we hope in fact do reflect the need and the demand within that community at the same time a community college still wants to prepare students who are able to be globally competitive and so there's a certain tension there that needs to be worked out I think over time I would be remiss if I didn't throw in though a pitch for the connecting credentials framework on which corporation or skilled workforce has done so much work because it serves I think as a truly effective translation tool between programs between courses between degrees and certificates that allows you to understand what things represent and what they mean so if you haven't looked at the tool do so please great gosh we've already addressed so many issues abroad I mean this is good this is good I guess one of the things I'm trying that last week in inside higher ed one of their bloggers Joshua Kim talked about alternative credentials and did he said it was pretty much a certainty for him that alternative credentials the kinds of things we're talking about should be complementary to traditional credentials like a degree and not replace them you know but but we've been talking about this often on the last few days last couple times we met and I well I guess what I would like to ask you is have we settled that I mean our you know one of the one of the ways I took what he was saying was a raise the question for me is are these alternative credentials add-ons that are needed because a degree doesn't tell you about a graduate skills or or does this mean that degrees well as you said they're sort of the baseline but but are they because they're only a baseline have they lost some relevance in some way and so what's the proper relationship between alternative credentials and more traditional ones thank you gosh I don't know but so well first of all it's really hard to define an alternative credential I'm not sure anyone really agrees on what that means because some of them are high stakes some of them are low stakes couple high stakes examples you know we couple of our customers a Google Docker New Relic these are these are companies that are not education companies but they have an education arm so Google trains you how to be a you know certified Google engineer right and Docker is it's you know it's a technology and so the best people to learn about being Docker certified are Docker themselves and they're starting to launch their own sort of training programs and these are often requirements as well you need a degree you need to show that you're a program or something but you also need to show that isn't enough nowadays in many you know I need to be Amazon Web Services certified or you know and so nowadays I think that those alternative credentials are becoming quite important quite high stakes and communicating what they are and and and what you can bring to an organization once you've done that training is a challenge but then you know when the other side you've got companies like you know Udacity or Coursera who would be mentioned today I think Jackie mentioned that and sorry Joanne sorry and who I think they're really sorry you know I think no one really knows often what what value they bring but often I think it's obviously bring a lot of value to some people and because it shows that you're staying current and things like that so some employers are very much looking for you having done Coursera and Udacity courses but it's really hard to know and different employers have such different mindsets on this different people in different organization in the same organization will have very different mindsets on this so I'm not sure and I think that we're just so early that we need a sort of cultural layer to sort of bubble up and we need to work a little bit on that before we can start to try and define it so I think apparently it's my role on the panel to be the designated quip a cater so the answer is it depends so if you come to a community college you might wish to only become a licensed nursing assistant over a period of however many weeks to take the class go to a nursing home typically our hospital do the work-based learning take the various tests walk away with a license you don't need a degree you don't need any or sort of traditional academic marker you need this piece of paper issued by the state that says you were licensed to do the work likewise if you want to become a commercial driver driving a big truck you can come to a community college in many in many states and take the coursework necessary to become a commercial driver sometimes that will be a credit not very often but occasionally that is a credit bearing program in which you will receive a certificate rarely a degree or certificate but you don't really care about that what you care about is the piece of the paper from the state that says you are medically cleared you have passed the tests you are drug-free and you can actually go out and get paid to drive a truck for a living at the same time I do think the question is not so much are there too many certificates or is it getting too confusing so much as it is are the certificates that are being issued clear to students clear to employers and clear between a and among institutions about what they represent the skills knowledge and abilities that actually underpin those things if that isn't clear then I then I would say yes why do you want offer something that nobody knows what it means but I'd love to build on that I think that's so important you know we're in this age now where we know so much information about people that you know you can advertise if you have it if you're selling baby toys right you can find pregnant women in DC and sell the baby toys on Facebook right that's the resolution that we can but why can't we do that for careers it's insane to me that we have more information about which restaurant I go to and whether or not I will statistically like it than which job I'll get and whether or not I'll be good at it and enjoy it and yet I spend most of my life working why is that that's insane to me and so I think we need to get really good at figuring out okay what do employees need and how can we communicate and understand that what are schools providing and the learners in the middle you know how to what extent are they meeting those and match them you know and we've solved it in other easier you know places I think that you know this isn't we could use the lessons we've learned in places like advertising not for you know making you spend money but actually getting you a great job that you'll love and where you'll provide the best work that you could and I think you know right now if you're trying to get a job it's a horrible process and if you're trying to find a person to employ it's a horrible process where it's inefficient you know you might interview a hundred candidates and if you're lucky one of them will be really great fit if you're lucky and the flip side is you know you might apply to like 20 or 30s you know places but you're doing it from a often a point of desperation where if I don't get a job I'm not paying rent next month or something like that so will you really get the right job for you or will you just get the best of a bad bunch right and I think that we're ready now as a society to get enough data on both sides and match people because of you know innovations in things like credentialing and because of you know standards like connecting credentials and so on where it's slowly coalescing into what I think you know will be a much more efficient way to get a job which is hey here are seven jobs which you're already qualified for three of them want to interview tomorrow yes or no you know that that I think could be the future if we just sat down and collected the data and I'm also struck by I guess it was Michael Saylor's example yesterday of using your phone as a transponder to just go into a room and scan it and say oh this is how many people have scuba diving licenses or you know something like that and I don't know if that's something that people are actively contemplating yeah so you know we're about to release the ability to put things like certificates on your Apple wallet and on your Android wallet like you can with boarding passes and things like that and so it's only one step away from being able to really quickly you know share these things and communicate but I think that you know the tech ecosystem has solved this in way less important areas and we just need to apply that learning to something like this and you know it just takes not just the technological side but the cultural side to kind of want that and I think you know it just takes a few examples and so you need to first solve it in a niche area like okay great well we solved it for this you know this one example company where they were willing to hire all these people in a much faster way and they had way better outcomes and I think we need to showcase studies and do research on what is possible and but you know give it ten years I think the way you apply for jobs and get jobs will be much more pleasurable for everyone involved yeah I just based on this these thoughts I think it all depends is the right answer overly structured overly structured relationships between credentials might be a barrier to the ability to be more agile I think getting a job first is an attractive option for many people in the country we're working on a project now with an equip project where people have gotten manufacturing jobs this is good but then as they're seen as value of having a broader credential or a foundational credential for career or business purposes so how they relate or connect they need to connect and to clear signals as a way to help them help them connect so if you're tweeting about this I think it all depends should be the dominant the theme that keeps coming back maybe I don't know yeah or I don't know we don't know well I don't want to speak for everyone here because we're very different but Danny you actually raised a question that I that I did want to ask about which is you know if some of these credentials and again it depends on which ones we're talking about but if a lot of them are measuring those I know we don't want to say soft skills life readiness skills work readiness skills that sort of thing a lot of them are things that happen outside of the classroom you could conceivably be recording your progress towards some of these to master some of these skills as you know as you go through your daily life but it certainly raises the question of privacy you know how intrusive should these kinds of measurements of what you're doing how you know how intrusive should they be I mean we have as it turns out two people with engineering background on the panel no okay good sorry but you know there's a whole it raised for me the question of the Taylorism you know where you do these time in motion studies of workers to try to make their what they do more efficient and you capture all of the things that there that go into what they do in their daily lives I mean is there a concern or should we be concerned about that kind of thing intruding into this new world of credentialing I'll take that one no okay thank you no I think it's it's an interesting question particularly as it relates to soft skills there's again from the community college perspective there's this notion that oh we need to teach soft skills because our students aren't getting soft skills I think in fact there's a lot more soft skills teaching that goes on than anybody recognizes it's just that nobody identifies it as such so when the welding instructor comes to class in it presenting in a particular way in terms of dress and cleans the workspace in a particular way and works with students in a particular way the instructor doesn't necessarily tell her students I'm doing this because this is what you are going to be expected to do when you go into the workplace and you should model it because it is a soft skill and yet that's exactly what's going on and you can look at that across multiple careers and multiple competencies that in fact there is a soft skills component that's actively being taught just nobody ever bothers to name it and and and I will go back again to the credentials framework and I'm not getting paid to do these promotions but I might as well say it there is the ability within the framework to identify where and how those things are being taught if if a medical assistant has a competency that involves filling out a chart in talk of a patient's medical history there is an implied soft skill there because that soft skill has to be has the ability to ask sensitive questions with some level of grace and dignity and record the answers accurately part of is getting answers right is clearly is clearly a competency doing it with grace and dignity and not making the patient feel like an idiot and doing it with some degree of privacy those are clearly soft skills in my mind working in an office environment while doing it is a soft skill because you have to be able to play well with others in an office environment we just don't ever name them as such when we're teaching them I think that's I love this topic and I think it's so important just to address the privacy point briefly to me it's trivially obvious that individual should control how and where their own credentials are represented and what they say we talked about Taylor's before and absolutely you know the the classically trained percussionist versus rock band drummer loved that example and it's one that we all just do naturally but credentials are terrible being molded into you know make different arguments towards different stakeholders but yeah you know some things that I've seen our customers do along this which I think is not structured at all and that might become a bit of a problem but for now it's a sort of stopgap is you know on one of the benefits of things like digital credentials is you can put things like evidence portfolios at the bottom of them so you know Rosetta Stone for example if you have a Spanish language certificate you can have a video of you speaking Spanish on the certificate and you know it's not just saying Rosetta Stone say you can speak Spanish at level three or whatever it's let me hear your accent let me see how how personable you are let me see if you're you know are you kind of introverted or extroverted you know you start to see these kind of softer things emerge if they're even if they're not sort of formally defined they kind of emerge you know one thing that you'd ask to do a lot of is a lot of project-based learning and then you can see where did this student really shine did they love the project management side of stuff or was it more like the user interface design or was it more you know the programming or whatever and they're doing this they're not they're not explicitly saying I'm a great you know x or y they're saying hey look at the look at let me provide you with my own narrative about what it was I thought I was good at and I thought that was very powerful because you have that baseline credential plus you have the individualized narrative and I think it's tragic that you know you graduate from university after two years or after four years or something like that and we hemorrhage all this information about who you are what you're passionate about in inside of school but also the extracurricular activities we hemorrhage that we summarize it down into a GPA you're a name and a number and that's it right and that's that's how we're judging people today when in fact we have a lot of information already you know if you go to your friends they will be able to find you a really great job for you because they know about you and they know what you're interested in and they've seen that evidence and so you know I think we should collect that put it on the credentials and have it in an unstructured messy form at least initially but still use the standard that you know employees are used to but just give them extra information so they can look at that before you know they press rejects I just added I just added a quick thought to that the so I think we all recognize soft skills are important and there's a lot being done to support the development of those skills the the the risk I see a little bit on the soft skills side is the fact that it's soft in other words we can define do we have standard definitions an old project I did about 35 years ago looking at engineering creativity and part of it was are you better in teams are you so the word teamwork has always been a nervous phrase for me because we use team team works a good idea nobody would disagree with the good idea but we also use teamwork behavior as weapons in other words I can say well you're not a good team player because that often has many dimensions to that judgment other than a solid definition it makes sense what I'm saying here yeah I can see you're not a good team player because you don't agree with me or you're always raising different issues or you're Samsung a little bit we need clear definitions of those terms or we run the risk of of introducing variables that really are not good or healthy for equity issues and for other other reasons well since you bring up the question of equity issues I I want to be aware of the time and give you all a chance to ask questions as well but one of the things that that that has also come up a bit when we talk about you know sort of alternative credentials or credentials as this kind of currency is that they seem to represent and for some people to move toward a more merit-based system of measuring people's skills you know rewards so this kind of meritocracy ideas in the background but aren't we always sort of deciding we might be thinking about how to expand access and credentials might be a way to do that but but aren't we always sort of deciding winners and losers when we decide well this person has this credential this one doesn't is there a way to design credentials that would promote increased access and equity just jumping off the point you we talked about the real is is really often the assessment of those skills is really where we need to be very very careful about our assessment models and about because that's where biases starts to play out both if it's standardized test biases play out in standardized tests but they at least in the standardized test arena there are legal standards for that but a lot of other assessments are not legal standards or assurance of compliance with any kind of guidelines so I think assessment design is a place within the credentialing world where where a better work can be done so I think as I think about about equity and access I like to think that of all the alternatives out there I think community colleges do a pretty good job their open access institutions they clearly are competitive but maybe competitive is not a strong enough word when it comes to cost it's a fraction of the cost in many cases of a more of a four-year institution I pulled I took the liberty of pulling the numbers from our latest set of we put out something called fast backs every year because it's a nice handy cheat sheet of stuff if you look at undergraduates writ large across the United States community college represents students represent 41% of all undergraduates 40% of first-time freshmen 56% of Native American students 52% of Hispanic students 43% of black students 40% of Asian Pacific Islander students I think while we can always do better I think we're at least trying to attack the equity question I think because we deal with so many non- traditional students in addition in terms of part-time older all kinds of returning students people launching new careers I think that the more credentials we offer that our industry recognized I think we are actually aiding in equity in access one of the challenges around the whole question verification that came up earlier what there is not sufficient verification of is the impact or effect of the credential on a lot of research and a lot of standards around its development about its design more process standards but can I predict impact can I predict result is where we're still missing a lot so the world of AI and all of that will I think bring about change where we can actually start to observe was there economic benefit or a business benefit or a mission benefit for having one or multiple credentials so I can start to predict their value once it moves to a data side I think that would be a common equalizer in a lot of ways but we haven't really done no one wants to put them no one wants to spend the money to do that side of the work very often I will say that at the local level that's happening every day with industry advisory boards that's exactly what they do long as you have the right industry advisory board yep right good well we're close to the end of our time and I wanted to I don't I don't know if people are jumping you know to ask questions but I'd like to give everyone the opportunity if there's a roving microphone or something around there so yeah we've got two three minutes if we don't can we ask them questions yes yes yes should we start there and yeah all right good questions from we've covered the whole thing oh great no center there thank you for your sacrifice yes look up for the team I'd be interested to get the panel thoughts on just the process of getting to the point where the employers the people writing job descriptions are thinking of the jobs in the credentialing language where they can send out the signals for students to then figure out how to do the matching because when I think about where the rubber meets the road you have people trying to translate jobs into skill sets and you have people trying to translate skill sets into resumes like you know how do we get to the point where the employers are able to translate jobs not just the technical ones which I think have already been effectively done and those were sort of the low-hanging fruit but to other jobs were a little bit more complex into a series of badges or credentials to aid the matching process great question thanks how this might change the process of hiring yeah I will say one one thing that I think helps with that is is the growth in work-based learning opportunities when you see more students doing their learning in the job site I think employers begin to understand better what it is that the job and and before I came to work for the American Association of Community Colleges I worked for 15 years at a small excuse me rural college part of my job was was this work in working with employers and I don't think I'm telling tales out of schools say their employers are sometimes the last people who know what the actual job is you have to go down on the shop floor and talk to the people who are doing the job whatever that whether it's in a hospital or a manufacturing plant or a real estate officer anywhere else but but I think that the more you you advance work-based learning opportunities for students the more that that means you have more employers engaged in the educational process I think that begins to ease the tension you're talking about yeah so you know organizations like connecting credentials are the first step in that and I think we need more like that and I think the biggest problem for this though is getting employers who are not a much in this group at all to change the way they think about recruiting and their processes that's hard that's really try and gather you know 70 universities to do the same thing that's nothing compared to this and I think the way you get around that is you need to give them something that they just fundamentally couldn't have done before you know it was it was the example I gave before where you're not gonna get fired if you hide somebody with like an MIT credential even if they turn out to be really terrible the way I think you get around that is by providing some sort of system or tool or something like that where they can get something just fundamentally better it's worth taking that risk so finding the diamonds in the rough although I don't think that's a great way to look at it personally but you know having just way more intelligent ways to match you know if you're trying to go and find someone it's less about like putting out a job description nowadays I think and saying okay come to me and prove to me you've got XYZ and it's more a bit of a hunt and it's like okay I want someone to come and do this tell me which candidates do you think you know would be good and then I'm gonna look through them and kind of match it myself if we can have a better system like that which you know credible you know kind of has a foot in that would they then start to change the process just because they're gonna get more likely to have higher you know matches with what they're looking for so I think it's gonna be more of a sort of cultural change than a sort of systemic or technical one or you know standards based one but the standards are required for those systems to even have a hope of working so I think we'll try first we'll get a kind of half right well then we'll kind of iterate over time and it'll just get a lot better and then more and more we'll be like yeah I got this amazing candidate that would not have come through because they did not have the credentials we usually look for and this person has risen in the organization so much that we should really change the way we do this I think I suspect that's how that's going to be answered and I think this is also where what is now becoming the whole area of a predictive analytics in the workforce to have much better metrics of what I as an employer what what what are the signals that can assure me that I'm getting better performance like one metric that like time to value is a metric like how the moment of hire to time of business value is an important metric if there can be evidence that different forms of credentials can keep that cost lower that's what's going to drive a lot of this I think I think the credentialing world and the predictive analytic world need to probably look at some of these issues together because there's a lot going on out there trying to predict and what data and what data points are essential in being able to predict outcomes so I think that's the engineering solution we get to a data driven system that we benefits and and some drawbacks absolutely others or we should probably wrap up oh no no one ever oh yeah there is no should we not do it anyway oh sorry all right we'll skip the dance number and just go to the question was there yes no right here in front I think yeah I just wonder if the day will come when instead of employers trying to define skills which is such a it's just so hard to imagine any standardized language in that dynamic varied world ever emerging especially because there's some proprietary interest at stake whether they will ask for certain credentials because the world of credentials has evolved to the point where the competencies that that credential represents are both clear and transparent that is so that the employer can say I want this credential it's got to be from an accredited place or certain set or industry recognized but instead of seeking skills and doing ads that list skills and we see this to some extent now but it's usually just a marker they ask for a degree a BA or something and that's just sort of an assurance that somebody is motivated and has a certain basic intelligence but if that goes to the point of competencies so that's a chicken and egg sort of problem the folks who produce the credentials as WGU is doing need to be to send clear signals about what the competencies involved are that employers can then hopefully start to seek credentials rather than to try to specify skills I think it's the whole point of offering industry recognized credentials in the first place my perspective all right well we have to go so but thank you very much really appreciate your