September 2026 | Digital Credentials, Skills-Based Hiring, and College-to-Workforce Strategy in the Age of AI
Episode: Digital Credentials, Skills-Based Hiring, and College-to-Workforce Strategy in the Age of AI
Publish Date: Sept. 29, 2026
Host: Rhea Kelly, editor in chief, Campus Technology
Guest: Rob Coyle, product manager, digital credentials, 1EdTech
Episode Overview
In this episode, Rhea Kelly and Rob Coyle talk about 1EdTech's recent reports on the digital credential ecosystem, including employer data needs and technical transport workflows into hiring systems.
Key Questions & Takeaways
What should digital credentials communicate to employers?
Include clear, verifiable information about a learner's skills, competencies, achievements, and supporting evidence so employers can understand what the candidate can actually do.
What is holding back broader adoption of digital credentials?
Address both awareness and technology gaps: help employers understand how credentials support skills-based hiring, involve employers in credential design, improve data transport into hiring systems, and use consistent language and data structures.
How does AI increase the value of verifiable credentials?
As AI makes it easier to customize résumés, cover letters, and even automate job applications, credentials can provide verified information about a candidate's qualifications and help employers evaluate applicants.
What role should higher ed IT leaders play in digital credential strategy?
Lead the effort while bringing in stakeholders such as registrars, advancement teams, and advisors, and help guide decisions around data, systems, identifiers, procurement, and build-versus-buy choices.
Where can institutions start with digital credentials?
Help learners identify and communicate the skills they are already developing, and consider credentialing co-curricular experiences such as student government and other campus activities as an early, lower-stakes opportunity.
Topic Index
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
00:37 What 1EdTech Does
01:38 Digital Credentials Explained
05:29 K12 Workforce Pipeline
07:03 Inside the New Reports
08:04 Employer Data Needs
11:05 Credential Transport Workflows
12:19 Barriers to Adoption
14:49 Consistency and Standards
17:08 AI Changes Hiring Signals
21:30 AI Skills And Literacy
23:33 IT Leaders Lead Strategy
28:09 Quick Wins for Learners
30:26 Design for Lifelong Use
31:47 Closing and Where to Listen
Transcript
Rhea Kelly 00:08
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host. And I'm here with Rob Coyle, product manager for digital credentials at 1EdTech, to talk about his organization's recent reports on the digital credential ecosystem and how institutions should be developing their college-to-workforce strategy in the age of AI.
Rob Coyle 00:33
Ah, thank you so much. It's great to be here today.
Rhea Kelly 00:37
So to start, can you give us a quick overview of your work at 1EdTech.
Rob Coyle 00:42
Yeah, absolutely. So 1EdTech is a, it's an organization, we're a global nonprofit that really focuses on trying to help promote learning through enabling technology solutions that we develop as a community. We've been around for almost 30 years now, working, working in this education technology space. My specific work is around digital credentials. So you may have heard of things like open badges and comprehensive learner record, or our CASE Competency and Academic Standards Exchange work. That's all part that we cover, and I specifically focus on the open badges and comprehensive learner record. I partner with higher ed and K-12 and our technology solution providers to develop the latest standards and to help support implementation and promotion of those.
Rhea Kelly 01:38
Okay, so I think it would be great to start with a basic definition of digital credentials, and, and kind of explain why they're important and how are they different from like a traditional transcript or diploma.
Rob Coyle 01:50
Oh yeah, great question. So credentials, I mean, really, right, we're talking about any technology standard, right? It is an, an agreed-upon way to exchange data, right, at its simplest. Credentials in particular are our agreed-upon way to share learning and employment kind of information. You know, whether that's a transcript or a micro credential or a full degree or whatever the case might be, there are ways that we can bundle this data into a predetermined package that then can easily be shared so that a person can read it, but also so that another receiving system or technology platform can take that information inside of it. So really, that's, you know, that, that's kind of at its basic. The key for these is the metadata that's contained inside. So let me give an example that we probably all have seen or experienced, right, a traditional transcript coming out of higher ed or K-12. I can put that in a PDF, and I have it, an electronic copy that I can then share. But what I may not have is this rich metadata underneath that makes sure that all of the information on that transcript can be easily understood by a receiving system. Right? It's not just a picture of the file; it's all of the data that is underneath. And that's really great credentials in a nutshell. It's this predetermined package, way to package all of our metadata information so that it can easily be shareable and understood by the systems. And I think for higher ed, right, it's really important as we are placing greater emphasis on helping learners connect that education to opportunity, to be able to exchange that data in a way that's trusted and verifiable is really, you know, a significant component of helping them to, to discover that. And as I mentioned, unlike, you know, the traditional diplomas or the, the transcripts, we can include a lot of other additional information like the skills or competencies, specific achievements that someone's learned, and that can really help the employer see the full context of this learner, and not just, you know, this class with this grade, and here's, you know, the ultimate certificate or certification or degree that was awarded. The other thing I want to mention too, just laying, you know, the foundation here for terminology, digital credentials are often confused with micro credentials, right? Micro credentials being like the academic course of study that we're recognizing, right? Maybe it's you took a course or you completed something at the institution, and you're being awarded, you know, a micro credential or a badge or something like that. But the, the digital credential is the way to package that information and share it. So we, you know, we're often conflating those two, and I really want to make sure we're distinguishing, right, the, we're talking about the mechanism to share, not, you know, what went into earning whatever was being recognized. And all of that supporting, right, skills-based hiring. We're hearing so much about, you know, employers are really looking for ways to help understand who these candidates are and what they can do, and not just, you know, oh, you know, a degree is a proxy for a lot of assumed information. If we can make this transparent in a credential, especially the skills data, that really is going to help them identify the, the most qualified candidates.
Rhea Kelly 05:18
I'm so glad you mentioned the, the difference between micro credentials and digital credentials. And it sounds like the digital credentials, it's really about the, the data and the interoperability. And then also I'm very curious because you mentioned you work with K-12 as well as higher ed. Is that a sign that that sort of workforce pipeline is starting earlier?
Rob Coyle 05:41
Well, I think there's a few different things that the K-12 area is really exploring. One of them is for their own internal staff training, professional development, being able to credential that work, which, you know, recognizes the, the employees working in K-12 and allows them to have recognition that they can use either as evidence for promotion, or in some cases, if they're transferring to a different district in, in the state, they have, you know, they have this credibility of, within the credential, of, of their accomplishments. But also, I think you're absolutely right, you know, if we look at the students in the K-12 specifically, when we start looking at you know high school, secondary, there is an opportunity for them to begin a workforce pipeline. One of the examples that I often go to is around nursing. Right? I have, my daughter went through an allied health program when she was in high school, and that certainly led to some certification that she could use to go and get a job while she is, you know, working in, a student in K-12 or, you know, working towards her degree. So really, I think there is a pipeline that's coming out of K-12. That pipeline also, you know, can go right into higher education as well. But you can take some of that learning with you.
Rhea Kelly 07:01
That's so interesting. Okay, so 1EdTech recently published some reports examining the digital credential ecosystem. Could you break that down for us, and what were the most important findings?
Rob Coyle 07:13
Yeah, so we were able to conduct some research across, I think, this whole education workforce community. We looked at published research that was out there. We conducted focus groups, discussions. We engaged industry experts. And from those conversations, we, we produced two distinct reports. One of them is really focused on that employer side, and specifically, what is the data that employers are looking for inside credentials so that they are more likely to accept them in their hiring processes. The other is a little more technical. It has to do with the actual transport mechanisms. So, what does it take to bundle these credential data and transfer that over? I would say the biggest findings. Well, let's, let's do each of the reports separately. So the, the biggest finding for me in that employer report is, again, we hear from employers they're interested in the skills-based hiring and, you know, they want to understand the candidates better and not use that degree as, as proxies, which we kind of know. But there is more opportunity to work with them to understand their needs, and how they are communicating, and the language that they use, and really dive into that data a little bit more that they're looking for to help understand. So, for example, an employer says they want to do skills-based hiring means we need to communicate skills, but what about the skill do we need to include? What, what details are they looking for? Are they looking for evidence or something else? What kind of skills data are they actually looking to include or to be able to receive? And again, an example here. We, so a skill that I've sometimes seen, you know, communicated in a credential is communication. That could mean a whole lot of things, right? Is that verbal communication? Is it oral communication? And how did they earn that credential? Did they complete a project? Did they take a test? Did they attend a webinar? Right? An employer is going to weigh all of those different experiences very different, and we want to make sure that it's transparent to them what went into that. Because if we don't have that transparency and we don't have that trust signal, what are we going to do? We're going to go back and rely on what we always know, you know, which is usually the degree as a proxy. The other thing, and this, this was probably the, the big finding for me, that I really I kind of understood but it was but not to the level of detail we were able to get into in these reports. Employers aren't all the same, right? We often just say employers like they're one big bucket of people, but there's really a lot of different hands, different stakeholders involved in a hiring process, right? There's the recruiters, there's the hiring manager, maybe there's your frontline supervisor after you get hired, and all of them have a stake in this, and all of them are looking at some of the data elements a little bit differently. So being able to understand that really, I think, is really going to help us be able to build these, these credentials better. So the example here is evidence. Okay, someone wants evidence. Does, is a recruiter really going to spend time watching your video or reading the report that you wrote or whatever? Probably not. But the fact that evidence exists for this credential might be the trust signal that they're looking for, and then they pass that along to the hiring manager, who then could really dive into that evidence a lot more. So knowing how to include the data and what data which employers are looking for at different points really, I think, brings to light some opportunities that, that we can do when we're designing our credentials and credential programs. The second report, sorry, I took a long time there. The second report is really the technical one about, you know, once a credential is issued, how does it get its way over into an employment system, you know an HRIS system or an applicant tracking system. What are those mechanisms? How do we, how do we transfer that data? The, the big finding for me in that one was really just being able to understand the full scope of the different workflows and understanding, hey, sometimes it's a learner who needs to move a credential.
Rob Coyle 11:43
Sometimes we want to connect a credential platform to a whole other system and move things in bulk. And that's not a use case that we talk about a lot. And so, just understanding all of those different workflows, understanding what has been adopted in the market today versus what we think is out there, some ideal state that we often go to. So it really helped us to understand this market a lot better, and where there are some opportunities that we think can also make this learning to opportunity workflows even better.
Rhea Kelly 12:18
It sounds like employers, I mean, you've mentioned how they're interested in skills-based hiring. What would you say is standing in the way of sort of broader adoption of digital credentials? Is it like a technology issue? Is it a an awareness issue?
Rob Coyle 12:35
Yes, to both of those. But, but I think we, there's some nuances there that, that we should really try to understand a little bit better. So we say that there's an awareness issue, but I think that's on a lot of different sides, right? Is the awareness the, there's awareness opportunities for the employers to understand how credentials can help in the skills-based hiring that they're really interested in, and understanding, you know, what these different pieces mean and how they connect together and how they can get into their system. I think there's some, you know, understanding that needs to happen on the institution side for how can you build these credentials? How can you include employers in this conversation? How can we help create better programs that meet their needs? How can we better communicate what we've done and what goes in these credentials to meet the employer needs? The technology piece, you know, there's, there's a lot of different layers in that, right? There's the, there's the layer about moving all the credential data from your learning management system into your SIS systems and getting it into the credentials. There's the layer of, you know ,issuing the credential to the learner and they're accepting that credential and moving it, moving it somewhere. And we're pretty good at those two layers. But then the, the next part of it is then the employer taking that data into their systems, and that's, that's a place where there's some definite growth opportunity here. But also, kind of going back to what I said earlier, that semantic interoperability layer, understanding what that data means and understanding how it means, you know, to, to the different people who are involved in this process. So being able to tease out some of those differences and under, making sure that we are speaking the same language. You know, I somewhat flippantly say higher education is really good at perpetuating higher education, but we have some growth opportunities when it comes to working, you know, with the employers. So I think there are, you know, there's some awareness issues. I think there are some, some technology issues. Some we're, we've solved, and, and some we still have some opportunities to, to go.
Rhea Kelly 14:49
And I imagine that, you know, the, the credentials and the evidence from like one institution might, like how, how do you make it consistent from one institution to the next, and make sure that it is always meaning the same thing across the board?
Rob Coyle 15:05
That, that's really good question, and there's, again, there's some nuances in there too, right? So the, the first thing to think about, I guess, from a technology perspective, and this is where the reports are calling for some additional conversations be had, is how can we ensure that we're all putting the information in the credentials in a way that can be understood? As in, are we actually putting the data in the credential in the same place, right? So an example is grades. There's actually a couple different ways that you could include grade information inside a credential. If we're not doing it the same way, then it's going to be harder for the employers to be able to interpret and understand the credential without having to go down and look at all the, the layers. So, if we can do better at building our credentials consistency, consistently with all the same data in all the same places, that's going to help big time. Consistency across institutions — that's, that's obviously probably a little bit trickier to accomplish. But at the same time, if we can be consistent in some of the language, but, but especially if we're working with the employers, right, and understanding their aspects of it, right? What my local employers in the state of Maryland are looking for, and, you know, what other people in different states are looking for, that might be somewhat different. And it's okay to customize to meet some of the local needs if they're the ones who are hiring my students. When it comes to the bigger organizations that maybe have, you know, presence all across the, the country, you know what a local is looking, what a local area of that employer is looking for, probably is not going to be too different from what someone else is. So there's, there's opportunities, again, if, even if we're working with a local, we might be working with national organizations as well. So we're never going to get identical, and that's okay. But consistency is what we're really looking for.
Rhea Kelly 17:08
These days, you know, AI is touching so many things, and it strikes me that AI must be changing the work significantly around digital credentials. You know, I imagine it could do a lot in terms of, of developing that metadata, or you know, in a more sort of streamlined, automated way. So, what do you think? Like, how, how is AI impacting your work, first of all, and, and on the technology side?
Rob Coyle 17:38
Oh, I was wondering when AI was going to come up, right? It's kind of required in every conversation these days. AI, yeah, you know, there's a lot of opportunities, but there's also some challenges. So let's start with the opportunities, right? We know that AI is really helping institutions to dive through curriculum, to understand skills, to, to, you know, helping to define pathways, and creating, you know, guidance for learners on how to get, to get through these programs, connecting learners to the opportunities that are out there. AI can help create those guided paths. So, so a lot of, lot of pros there. The oppor the, the challenge is, though, is what we're seeing in terms of employers trying to find qualified candidates. More and more people are using AI to customize their résumés, to customize their cover letters. So now we all look perfect on paper for every job, right? And we're also hearing stories where people have developed AI agents to go and find jobs, customize their cover letters or résumés, and apply for those jobs, all through the agent. So they're applying for hundreds of jobs in a day. That is really a challenging for an employer to cut through all of those candidates, some of which are probably highly qualified and some of which maybe aren't as qualified. But it's hard to tell, and that's where credentials, I think, really has this opportunity because we can help to cut through that noise a little bit, right? If, if we can clearly demonstrate in the credential what qualifications a candidate has in a way that is verifiable, that, you know, that we can understand, then we can help to, we can use that as part of the hiring processes to, to look through the candidate pool, look who's got credentials, verify that information that's in there, and then, you know, that can be a better way of getting a qualified candidate pool. So again, a lot of opportunities there, but there's some challenges that we need to be aware of that might introduce other opportunities if we really explore that. The, you know, just thinking about how we can use the credentials to, to help improve processes as well. So a lot of times when you're going through a hiring process, you know, you, you get through the recruiters or whatever screening is happening, you do some interviews, maybe you get selected, and then, and then an employer starts doing background checks and, you know, reference verifications and all of that. That takes time and that takes money. We could do all of that in a credential and do all of that on the front end. So we can do, you know, if someone's applying for a position, I can already see, oh yes they have this degree, and I can verify that electronically. So I know it's legitimate. I can see their references information through endorsements. I can verify all of this information. Now I'm probably more qualified to get into that short list of candidate pools. So if we can kind of flip the script here, we can get that, get the more qualified candidates up front, can also save a lot of time and a lot of money. And, you know, that's, that, even a week or two of not having someone performing a job role can really cost an employer a ton of money, and from a candidate's perspective, you know many of us are looking for jobs now. We don't have a few extra weeks of disposable income, so anything we can do to shorten that process is a win-win all the way around.
Rhea Kelly 21:30
And then also, I feel like you must see some change in the types of skills that employers are wanting to see around AI.
Rob Coyle 21:41
Well, yeah, I mean, for sure, as we are — I mean, all of us — I think all of our jobs have changed drastically in the last couple of years as we've embraced AI and the different ways that it can support us. And employers absolutely are looking for that skill. You know, it's, it would almost be a handicap at this point if you don't have some experience using AI, meaningful. I mean, that doesn't mean that every institution should go wild and let everyone use it in every possible way, because always there's going to be concerns about academic integrity that come up. If this were an instructional design podcast, which is my background, I'd have a different answer for that, but I'll skip that for today. But, but there's, you know, these are important skills that employers are going to be looking for absolutely, and if students don't have that experience, it's going to, it's going to handicap them. So we as institutions, I think need to figure out the right way to build this into our programs so that learners are equipped, right? And, and AI literacy is, you know, it is itself a very different skill from, you know, AI usage. So being able to understand AI and write good prompts and understand agents and all of the things that we can do with, with AI these days, that's an important skill, and that's separate from, you know, can you use ChatGPT or can you use Claude or can you use, you know, any of the different agents that are out there. So understanding, teasing out all of those skills, understanding what they are, where we can fit them meaningfully and, you know, well, well-designed way within our curriculum, is going to absolutely be critical for tomorrow's, you know, employer candidates.
Rhea Kelly 23:33
So I want to make sure we talk about, you know, like what should higher education IT leaders be doing right now. So as institutions are developing their digital credential strategies, it, you know, it seems to me data and interoperability being so important, I mean that's totally the realm of IT. So, you know, what role should IT be playing in, in this sort of strategy making period?
Rob Coyle 24:02
Well, they should be leading for sure. They, I think, you know the, the, one of the key things here that I see missing a lot, and we've really been championing with some work of other partners around the, around the U.S. higher ed organizations, is the idea that we need to have all the right stakeholders at the table with us, and that often includes people that we wouldn't traditionally think about when we're standing up a new IT kind of initiative, right? So as you said, you know, there's, their data is all, you know, something that IT leaders really are all about, but so are the registrars, and they probably need to be in this conversation. You also need to think about institutional advancement, because they're often tracking what this, you know, how this is impacting the institution in some way or another. What about advisors? Advisors having a critical role in talking to the students about these programs. So, you know, we really need to be very broad in identifying all of those stakeholders, and, you know, IT leaders are one of the critical, you know, leaders in that, stakeholders in that, and they have the opportunity to help pull these, these different parties together, and so I think that's one of the really big, big opportunities. There is actually a blog post that the LER Accelerator Initiative put out last year, I think, around all of these different stakeholders. I think it's called "Who's at Your Table." So that might be a really good read, and maybe we can include that in, in some show notes or something, so everyone can find that, it's a really good read. I think, you know, we also need to think about some of the important decisions, discussions that each institution needs to have internally. When you're looking at these credential programs and the credential data, and, you know, you want to, and how you want to support your learners, there's a lot of things that you should ask yourself. You know, from, from what kind of identifier do we want to give the students, to, you know, what mechanisms do we want to, to build internally for gathering this data and capturing it right now. There's a lot of manual processes that are out there, and, you know, I'm sure we can do better about that. So IT leaders, I think, are in that position to, to really help to, to have those conversations and to make, lead some of the discussions on all of these different decisions. Actually, you know what? Here's another resource that I just thought about. We put out a, it's free public resource for procurement considerations, and it's, it's the considerations that the institutions need to, to work through internally before they go into adopting a platform or, or building their own, right? The build versus buy conversation. But there's a lot of nuances in those conversations that I think will really benefit the institutions if we get all the way through that. I guess the other, so one last thought here is that IT leaders are in a good position to advocate for the learner and being able to say, you know what, while there are these important conversations and there is all of these things that we need to figure out, there are steps that we can do today to benefit learners right away. So we don't always have to wait for, you know, every decision through every stakeholder that could ever possibly need to happen. You know, higher education sometimes can take a really long time to, to move on some of these initiatives. We can start small pilots today if we can start doing some quick things that benefit learners immediately. Even if it's just helping them understand the skills that they have in these, in these courses and programs that they're taking, that's an immediate benefit, and, and IT leaders I think are well positioned to help advocate for that.
Rhea Kelly 28:08
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to delve just a tiny bit deeper into those important first steps in terms of like what are the, the easy wins that, you know, that benefit students. So you mentioned helping them understand what skills that they're, that, that they are accumulating. So, is there anything more in that vein that, that you want to share?
Rob Coyle 28:30
Yeah, we can, we can dive into that for sure. So, skills are a big part, for sure, in that, you know, one of the things if we're in a world where employers want skills-based hiring, we need to understand as a candidate what skills we have and how we can communicate them. So helping, you know, learners understand the skills that they are developing and what that looks like for them in the context in which they're, they're applying those skills is a huge benefit. Obviously, credentialing them is important, but a lot of times when we get in credential program discussions, it's like, oh, we're, are we standing up a new program? Are we doing this? Are we, you know, how are we structuring this within our academic portfolio? And maybe there's other things that we can start right away. Look at the co-curricular activities that happen on a campus, which are usually lower stakes in terms of recognition of work, right? They don't get on a transcript all the time, so, right, there's, there's, sometimes it's easier to start over there. And there's tremendously valuable experiences that, that learners can have, right? Student government, you get all kinds of leadership opportunities that you can communicate. A lot of the activities that happen on a campus can really benefit learners if they can communicate those, and helping them to, to understand what that is, what that looks like, credentialing those opportunities so that they can, they can share and start, you know, using that meaningfully in their, in their life outside of higher education, I think is another huge win and a great opportunity that we can explore there.
Rhea Kelly 30:13
I love that idea of, you know, the, the starting with some low stakes things that really have a measurable benefit and are easy sort of quick wins. That's great.
Rob Coyle 30:25
Yeah. So here's, here's another thing that I, I will just throw out there as a consideration for higher education. When we issue a credential to a learner, we do not know when, where, how, or even if a learner is going to share that credential, right? But we make a lot of assumptions on their behalf when we're developing our programs. Oh, we have to do it this way, or, or we shouldn't give too many credentials because it, it muddies the, the waters, and we do this. But we don't know what a learner is going to do next week, next month, five years down the road. A lot of people I know have, you know, switched careers. The credentials that were important today may not be the ones that are important to them down the road. And so, if we can recognize their learning in all of their different forms and not make those assumptions on their behalf of how they're going to use that data, we have a, a big opportunity to help our learners long term, lifelong, even when they're no longer affiliated with our institution. So I would really challenge everyone to, to really question your questions and question your decisions and seeing if it's, you know, there are assumptions that you can weed through and possibly eliminate, because I think that's going to be a big win for learners.
Rhea Kelly 31:46
Thank you for joining us. I'm Rhea Kelly, and this was the Campus Technology Insider podcast. You can find us on the major podcast platforms or visit us online at campustechnology.com/podcast. Let us know what you think of this episode and what you'd like to hear in the future. Until next time.