Digital credentials and Learning and Employment Records (LERs) have been widely promoted as the missing link between education and employment, promising to help employers identify qualified candidates based on verified skills rather than traditional degree requirements. Yet despite years of investment and industry support, adoption remains fragmented. New research from 1EdTech suggests the problem is not the technology itself, but the lack of consistency, interoperability, and employer-friendly implementation needed to make digital credentials useful at scale.
The push toward skills-based hiring has accelerated in recent years as employers seek new ways to identify talent amid labor shortages, changing workforce demands, and growing questions about the predictive value of traditional credentials. Digital credentials and Learning and Employment Records (LERs) have emerged as key components of that transformation, offering a more granular view of an individual’s skills, competencies, and learning achievements.
However, according to two newly released reports from 1EdTech, the education and workforce ecosystems remain far from realizing the full potential of these technologies.
The reports—Bridging the Gap: Aligning Education and Workforce Adoption of Digital Credentials and Building Seamless LER Systems: A Path to Scalable Credential Data Sharing—examine why digital credentials have yet to achieve widespread employer adoption despite years of development and growing institutional support.
The findings point to a recurring challenge facing many workforce technology initiatives: innovation alone does not guarantee usability.
At the center of the issue is the disconnect between the way educational institutions issue credential data and the way employers evaluate talent. While hiring organizations recognize the value of detailed skills information, many continue to rely on resumes, degrees, and certifications because digital credential data often lacks consistency and clarity.
“Employers rely on familiar signals because they’re easy to understand,” said Curtiss Barnes, CEO of 1EdTech. “Digital credentials can offer more detail, but only if that information is consistent and usable.”
The research suggests that employers are not rejecting digital credentials. Rather, they struggle to interpret and compare credential information when institutions use different standards, formats, and definitions for skills and competencies.
This challenge arrives at a critical moment for the HR technology sector. Major workforce platforms, including LinkedIn, Workday, and SAP, have increasingly invested in skills intelligence, workforce planning, and talent marketplace technologies designed to move hiring beyond traditional degree requirements.
Yet the success of these initiatives depends heavily on reliable, standardized skills data.
The second report focuses on another obstacle: interoperability. Learning and Employment Records are intended to create portable, verifiable records that can move across educational institutions, employers, credential platforms, and workforce systems. In practice, however, many organizations still rely on custom integrations and manual processes to make disparate systems communicate with one another.
The result is a fragmented ecosystem where credential data can become difficult to exchange, verify, and maintain across platforms.
For HR leaders, the implications are significant. Organizations increasingly want access to verified skills information to support hiring, internal mobility, workforce planning, and employee development. However, when systems fail to communicate effectively, the administrative burden can outweigh the benefits.
The findings align with broader workforce trends identified by Gartner and the World Economic Forum. Both organizations have highlighted skills-based talent strategies as a growing priority for employers seeking to address labor shortages and future-proof their workforces.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs research, skills are becoming a more important predictor of employability than traditional qualifications in many sectors. Meanwhile, Gartner has reported growing enterprise demand for skills intelligence platforms capable of mapping workforce capabilities across organizations.
The challenge, however, lies in creating a common language for skills.
1EdTech’s research argues that progress does not require an entirely new technology framework. Instead, it calls for greater consistency in how credential information is created, shared, and interpreted across systems.
Among the key recommendations are improving credential discoverability, establishing common methods for describing skills, ensuring systems can exchange information without losing context, and implementing reliable identity verification mechanisms that allow individuals to be matched accurately across platforms.
These recommendations reflect a broader shift in workforce technology strategy. Rather than pursuing entirely new solutions, many organizations are focusing on interoperability and standards as the foundation for scalable innovation.
“If digital credentials are going to be adopted, they need to make hiring easier, not more complicated,” said Michael Feldstein, Chief Strategy Officer at 1EdTech.
To address these challenges, 1EdTech is promoting several initiatives designed to improve alignment across the education and employment ecosystem. These include the TrustEd Credentials Open Badges 3.0 Profile, which aims to establish baseline data requirements for digital credentials; the Edu-API Credential Provisioning Taskforce, focused on streamlining credential data exchange; and the CASE Global Ecosystem, which supports interoperable standards for competencies and learning outcomes.
Collectively, these efforts seek to solve what industry observers often describe as the “last-mile problem” of skills-based hiring—the gap between possessing skills data and making it useful in real-world hiring decisions.
For employers, educational institutions, and HR technology vendors, the message is clear: the infrastructure for digital credentials largely exists. The next phase of adoption will depend less on building new tools and more on improving coordination between the systems already in place.
As organizations continue shifting toward skills-first talent strategies, the ability to exchange and verify credential data seamlessly could become a critical component of workforce transformation efforts. The question is no longer whether digital credentials can work, but whether the industry can align around the standards necessary to make them work together.
Market Landscape
The global skills-based hiring market is expanding as organizations seek alternatives to degree-centric recruitment models. Research from Gartner, the World Economic Forum, and McKinsey & Company indicates growing enterprise interest in skills intelligence platforms, workforce analytics, and credential verification systems.
Digital credentials and Learning and Employment Records are increasingly viewed as foundational technologies for this transition. However, widespread adoption depends on interoperability, standardization, and employer trust. As workforce platforms invest heavily in skills data infrastructure, industry-wide collaboration may prove more important than technological innovation alone.
Top Insights
- 1EdTech’s research found that employers value digital credentials but often revert to resumes and degrees when skills data is inconsistent or difficult to interpret.
- Interoperability remains a major challenge, with many organizations relying on custom integrations that increase complexity and limit scalability.
- The reports suggest that existing technologies can support skills-based hiring if credential data standards become more consistent across systems.
- HR technology vendors are increasingly dependent on standardized skills data to power workforce planning, talent marketplaces, and internal mobility initiatives.
- Industry collaboration around standards and credential frameworks may be the key to unlocking broader adoption of Learning and Employment Records.
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