Announcements & Commentary
Building Toward Learner-Owned Portable Proof of Capability
By Maria Anguiano, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at College Futures Foundation
Recruiting expert Lou Adler has a simple rule: don’t hire based on credentials alone. Hire based on demonstrated ability to perform the job. He calls it performance-based hiring, and I have personally used this method to make hundreds of hires. The approach forces you to move beyond traditional proxies like degrees and ask more meaningful questions. Can they solve the kinds of problems the role requires? Have they built something similar before? Have they taken initiative in prior roles? In other words, the important question isn’t “What credentials do you have?” It’s “What can you actually do, and how do we know?”
That lesson returned to me during a recent conversation with a group of student entrepreneurs. When classmates apply for roles at their companies, many still submit traditional résumés centered on coursework. These young CEOs often find themselves coaching peers to move beyond class lists and instead articulate what they can actually do and how their experience applies to the work at hand.
Strip away the layers of HR process and policy, and the request is straightforward. Employers want to know whether someone can do the work. Learners want real pathways to build that capability and fair ways to demonstrate it. Yet the way we document learning and screen for talent often makes that match harder than it needs to be.
In earlier posts, I argued that our postsecondary system must flex around learners’ lives, recognize learning across a lifetime wherever it occurs, and use technology to expand access while scaling quality. If we want flexibility, scale, and lifelong pathways to work, we must also rethink how capability itself is signaled and trusted. This blog focuses on that next piece of the puzzle: how we see, verify, and carry proof of capability across a lifetime.
The Limits of Proxies
For decades, degrees and credentials served as society’s most widely accepted signal of professional capability. In a world of limited information and scarce verification tools, that shorthand made sense. A degree signaled persistence, exposure to structured learning, and some level of institutional validation.
Over time, however, what began as a practical signal hardened into a filter that now excludes many talented individuals from economic opportunities. When credentials function as the dominant screen, learners whose skills were developed through work, military service, entrepreneurship, caregiving, or community leadership are often filtered out before their capabilities are even considered. Even those who complete traditional programs often struggle to translate transcripts into clear evidence of what they can actually do. The issue is even more visible for the nearly 40 million Americans who have completed some college coursework but never finished a degree. Much of what they learned remains invisible in the labor market.
The deeper challenge is that credentials were never designed to provide clear insight into what someone can actually do. They function as shorthand signals, offering a rough indication of preparation rather than a transparent view of capability. When we rely primarily on those signals, we end up optimizing for the proxy rather than the underlying capability it is meant to represent.
That reliance carries real consequences. Systems built around proxy signals tend to advantage those with access to high-prestige institutions and strong networks, while making it harder for others to be recognized on the basis of capability alone.
Proxy signals also shape institutional behavior. When success is measured primarily by the number of credentials produced, institutions are pushed to maximize throughput. When success is defined by demonstrated capability, incentives shift toward designing learning that builds applied knowledge, cultivates mentorship, and connects meaningfully to opportunity.
Learning and Employment Records: Promise and Pitfall
A core challenge underlying this dynamic is that our education and workforce systems still lack shared ways to describe learning in clear, comparable, and verifiable terms. Skills developed through coursework, work experience, community leadership, or training programs are often recorded in different formats, stored in different systems, and described using different language. Without common ways to translate what someone has learned into trusted information, even meaningful learning can remain difficult for employers and institutions to recognize.
Learning and Employment Records, often called LERs, have emerged as one response to this challenge. At their core, they are structured, verifiable records that capture what a person knows and can do over time. Rather than listing courses completed or degrees earned, an LER can capture demonstrated competencies, work-based experiences, certifications, projects, apprenticeships, and other forms of applied learning. These records are designed to be verifiable, digitally shareable, and controlled by the learner.
The promise here is powerful. When learning is captured as demonstrated skill rather than course titles or credential type, learners can showcase what they can actually do. Employers, in turn, can look beyond proxy filters and focus on demonstrated capability, reducing reliance on shorthand signals when making high-stakes hiring decisions.
The risk is that LERs could easily become little more than digital transcripts of existing credential categories. If that happens, the system’s filtering logic remains intact. For LERs to have real impact, they must expand our ability to recognize and measure what someone can do, enabling learners to translate the full range of their skills and experiences into language employers understand and trust.
Centering the Learner in the Architecture of Mobility
As the credential landscape continues to expand and skill demands evolve, the challenge is ensuring credentials clearly communicate what someone has actually learned. Achieving that clarity requires intentional design. Four principles should guide that work.
- Recognize Learning Across a Lifetime and Across Contexts
Human capability develops through applied practice, mentorship, experimentation, collaboration, and increasing responsibility over time. It is built not only through formal education but also through work experience, community engagement, military service, caregiving, entrepreneurship, and applied projects. A modern learning system should allow evidence of learning to accumulate across experiences, contexts, and levels of expertise as individuals deepen and apply their skills. Learning developed through coursework, work experience, and other pathways should be recognized, including when formal credentials are only partially completed or when capabilities are developed outside traditional educational programs.
- Capability Must Be Trusted and Recognized Across Systems
Evidence of capability expands opportunity only when it is trusted across education and employment systems. That trust requires credible approaches to validating skills, employer participation in defining and assessing capability, and shared ways of describing learning. Without these foundations, records of learning risk becoming information that no one uses rather than evidence that helps individuals move more easily between learning and work.
- Place Learners at the Center Through Ownership and Data Rights
Learners must be recognized as the primary stewards of their learning records. They should be able to decide when and how their information is shared, with clear rights around consent, selective disclosure, and revocation. Safeguards must prevent employers or vendors from capturing, monetizing, or unilaterally controlling learner data. These protections are essential to building public trust and ensuring that these systems are truly learner-centered.
- Learner Infrastructure Illuminate Pathways and Expand Opportunity
A learner-centered system should not simply store records. It should help learners understand how their capabilities connect to real opportunities. Clear visibility into career pathways, wage outcomes, and skill gaps can help individuals make informed decisions about where to invest their time and effort next. Advising systems across education and workforce programs should rely on consistent and interoperable skills data so learners receive coherent guidance wherever they begin.
California’s Career Passport initiative reflects a statewide effort to rethink the traditional transcript so that more of a learner’s real experiences and capabilities can be recognized. Anchoring that work in these principles can help ensure that new systems recognize what people can actually do rather than simply digitizing existing credentials. In that future, capability, not institutional affiliation, becomes the signal that opens doors, creating a more equitable and learner-centered system of opportunity.
