You can access the 2023 SmartReport here to compare the infographics to observe year over year progress in this ecosystem.
There are many great vendors in the digital credentialing space. And as consumers, it can be confusing for us to piece together how they overlap, interconnect, and sometimes to even distinguish whether they are complementary or competitive. This ecosystem map is a valuable tool for understanding who some of the partners are and, more importantly, what roles they play."
— Noah Geisel, Micro-Credential Program Manager at University of Colorado Boulder
While there are over 150 logos represented in this report, we intentionally worked off a narrow definition of the “LER Ecosystem” as the companies and organizations that share, issue, and consume these data standards:
These data standards enable records of learning and achievement to be mobilized to help individuals better understand their skills and qualifications, communicate those to interested parties, and to be discovered on their terms by organizations who can offer them earning or learning opportunities.
Please note that the LER-Resume Standard will be released by HR Open Standards in 2024.
This report is organized from left to right to represent how individuals (a.k.a. learners and earners) have their achievements, skills, and qualifications recognized by organizational issuers, assume agency (control) over these official records, move those records between systems, and ultimately receive value from those records as they are consumed by different types of organizations such as employers, educational institutions, and government agencies.
For example, let’s say Jessica attends community college where she earns a series of credentials representing learning achievements, skill attainment, and a professional certification. She is issued these credentials from her community college as open badges through a verifiable credential issuing platform. She then takes agency over these records and stores them in her credential wallet. Jessica imports these open badges into a talent marketplace and builds a profile around this data by adding self-attested information about her work experience and her own knowledge of skills she has built through her lifetime of learning both in the classroom, on the job, and through her volunteer work. She submits this Learning and Employment record to an employer in the talent marketplace who can then review her full profile, verify her official learning records and decide if she is qualified to interview for a job. In this way the employer has “consumed” this data and acted upon it. This spectrum of activity is what is covered in the SmartReport.
The infographics include five macro categories and twenty nine micro categories to organize the types of organizations involved in this ecosystem into common groups based on their contributions to the issuance, sharing, and consumption of the four data standards.
The 29 sub-categories will be defined later in this report.
In a relatively obscure world of digital credentials, digital wallets, learning and employment records (LERs), career navigation and skills-based talent management applications – SmartResume kicked-off the effort to demystify the organizations, roles, and data flow of what many call the LER ecosystem in a powerful visual: the SmartReport Ecosystem Map."
— Kymberly Lavigne-Hinkley, Director, Learning and Employment Record Ecosystem
You may notice that some prominent companies like LinkedIn don’t appear on this report. LinkedIn is in fact the world’s largest talent marketplace. But you cannot add or store any of these data standards to your LinkedIn profile which is why they are not listed as a talent marketplace in the Verifiable Credential/LER ecosystem. You can link to other platforms that can verify your credentials on your LinkedIn profile, but this requires a leap to platforms that ARE listed on this report. In our conversations with LER experts we consistently referred to the definition of the ecosystem as the organizations that are issuing these specific data standards, sharing them, and consuming them to define which logos to feature in the report’s infographics. The LER ecosystem is closely tied to other larger ecosystems, but we do not attempt to describe those ecosystem participants in this report.
We have issued a Creative Commons license to these infographics to encourage widespread usage of this information. We simply ask that you preserve this information in its current form and link back to it when you share it.It’s impossible to fully define the infographics within the infographics themselves, so the information below is meant to clarify and enhance this map of the ecosystem. The logos on this report reflect our collective understanding of the organizations who are materially contributing to the growth and adoption of verifiable credentials standards, and to the vision of a learning and employment record fueled ecosystem that improves the livelihoods of the individuals it serves. We will continue to update this report in the years to come and welcome additional feedback. You can contact our team by emailing info@smartresume.com.
We conducted 38 interviews with subject matter experts from every corner of the LER Ecosystem. What we learned in these interviews led to over one hundred forty enhancements to the 2024 report.
To build the SmartReport we needed to dig deeply into every corner of the LER ecosystem. And we had the good fortune to interview some of the smartest people in the business. The big takeaway is that the future is bright, momentum is building, and there is a dizzying amount of innovation happening. Here are the top ten trends that our research revealed.
Click here to read a description of each of these trends including tangible examples of work uncovered through our research.
Post-Secondary Education: These are academic, credit based, accredited institutions who recognize different types of learning and student achievement by issuing verifiable credentials.
*Note - since hundreds of post-secondary institutions are issuing credentials, we established a bar to represent those who are the most advanced in doing so. The logos represent those institutions that issue verifiable credentials at scale, embed those credentials with skill data, and equip their students with a credential wallet.
Logos included: Purdue Global, Arizona State University, University of Arkansas, University of Montana, Western Governors University, Tennessee Board of Regents, Motlow State Community College, Miami Dade College, Ivy Tech Community College, The University of Texas System
Youth & Secondary Education: This includes high schools and organizations that provide education and training to people under 18 years of age. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: Liberty Public Schools, Davis Connect K-12 Online School, Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio, Scouts (including Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts), Pathways High
Employers: This sub-category is for employers who build training programs that include verifiable credentials and who create advancement opportunities for employees through these credentials. This also includes employers who issue verifiable credentials for employment records such as jobs held, or achievements made. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos Included: Pfizer, IBM, Walmart, Boeing, Ernst & Young
MOOC Platforms: Massive Online Open Course providers that provide online learning to the public.
Logos Included: Udemy, Udacity, Coursera
Skill Assessment: These organizations do not provide education or training but instead focus on assessing the skills, knowledge or abilities that individuals are able to demonstrate. The platforms shown in this report issue verifiable credentials directly to the individual to certify the skills they have validated.
Logos Included: Aon, Talview, Bioscience Core Skills Institute, Education Design Lab, ACT
Licensing & Professional Associations: Organizations that advance a particular profession, support the interest of people working in that profession, or certify the expertise of professionals in a specific profession.
Logos included: SHRM, CompTIA, HRCI, ATD, AICPA
Government: Government run departments that issue verifiable credentials to individuals, most often in the form of official records (e.g. high school transcripts) or licenses (e.g. a commercial driving license). (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Air Force, Colorado Department of Transportation, North Dakota Department of Information Technology
Workforce & Skill Development: Workforce Development organizations work to fill specific employer hiring needs by understanding gaps between open jobs and people in a region who are qualified to fill those positions. They then identify people who want to elevate their careers, provide training to those individuals, and provide placement services to match those individuals with a network of employers. Skill Development organizations serve a similar but less end-to-end role in training people to develop specific skills.
Logos included: Junior Achievement USA, Alamo Colleges District, IBM, Hubspot, Facebook Blueprint, Grow with Google, Forge Institute, Skillsoft, Colorado Workforce Development Council, Goodwill, Workforge
Learning Management Systems: A LMS is a software application that helps educators administer, track, report and deliver education to learners. They are an opportune place to provide documentation and proof to learners of their achievements which is why the LMSs shown each have integrations with VC/OB Issuing Platforms.
Logos included: Blackboard (from Anthology), Canvas (from Instructure), Brightspace (from D2L)
Learning Experience Platforms: A LXP is a platform that enables learners to manage their own learning experiences, often provided by employers at no cost to employees to upskill. Most LXPs don’t issue verifiable credentials directly so need to be integrated with VC/OB issuing platforms. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: Edcast, Degreed, Skilljar, Workday, Savvas Learning Company
Data Integrations Services: These companies help organizational issuers get the data from existing platforms (such as a LMS or Student Information System) into verifiable credential issuing platforms. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: LearnCloud (from Learning Economy Foundation), Dexterra
VC/OB Issuing Platforms: These platforms help organizations who want to issue digital credentials create those credentials in the W3C Verifiable Credential format or the 1EdTech Open Badge format. Learners are informed that they have a credential to claim and can do so through these platforms. These platforms create the data format and the verification process in a way that is portable and in control of the learner.
Logos included: Canvas Credentials, Credly, Accredible, Trusted Learner Network, Sertifier, Digit.ink, Badge List, Intelli Campus
CLR Issuing Platforms: These platforms help organizations who want to issue digital credentials create those credentials in the 1EdTech Comprehensive Learner Record format. Learners are informed that they have a learner record to claim and can do so through these platforms. CLRs are different from VCs/OBs in that they include multiple assertions. These platforms create the data format and the verification process in a way that is portable and in control of the learner.
Logos included: RANDA Solutions, Territorium, Instructure, MyHub (from National Student Clearinghouse), Parchment, Open Credential Publisher (from RANDA Solutions), LearnCard, Mastery Transcript Consortium
Verification Services: These companies help individuals verify information for which they are unable to receive a verifiable credential directly from an organizational issuer. For example, Verification Services may help someone create a credential to verify their age, or to help someone create a verifiable credential to represent a college degree from an institution that doesn’t provide that service.
Logos included: Cisive, Digital Bazaar, Trinsic
Ecosystem Funders: Philanthropic organizations that provide funding to other organizations to advance the verifiable credential and LER ecosystem to drive more equitable career and learning outcomes for all types of learners and job seekers. These funders serve a critical role in the ecosystem, providing the resources to catalyze new technologies and approaches which need support to become technologically practical and commercially viable.
Logos included: Walmart.org, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Charles Koch Foundation, Strada Education Network, Ascendium, GitLab Foundation
Issuer Enablement: Organizations that have long supported educators and other types of organizations that are now helping those organizations transition to issuing credentials in verifiable and LER form. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: National Student Clearinghouse, AACRAO, Education Design Lab, IEEE, C-BEN, Digital Credentials Consortium, American Council on Education, Trusted Learner Network
Ecosystem Development: Catalysts that bring together participants from across the Learn and Work ecosystem to advance the issuance, sharing, and consumption of verifiable credentials and LERs. These organizations often focus on themes like data interoperability, equitable design, stakeholder education, or regional adoption.
Logos included: SkillsFWD, SHRM, National Governors Association, Digital Bazaar, Digital Promise, Business Roundtable, Workcred (an affiliate of ANSI), T3 Innovation Network, Jobs for the Future, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Trust Frameworks/Registries: Trust frameworks are governance policy sets created by governance authorities that establish mutually agreed upon business and technical rules for creating, managing and sharing credentials to ensure that credentials are authentic, meaningful and trustworthy. Trust registries are lists of authorized issuers and verifiers, usually established by governance authorities, that grant the technical ability to issue and verify credentials. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: Digital Credential Consortium, Trusted Learner Network, Velocity Network
Credential Quality Evaluation: These organizations are working to measure the quality of individual credentials and/or educational providers in terms of the outcomes they drive for learners. These organizations are relatively new but intend to create data that can be contained within verifiable credentials to drive better decision making by the VC consumption enablement layer of the ecosystem, and to better inform learners on their educational and professional development options. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos included: Credential Lab (from Higher Learning Commission), Education Quality Outcomes Standards Organization
LER Technical Solution Development: Companies that help build the technology used to offer consumer facing platforms in the LER ecosystem. Companies in this sub-category have built solutions for organizational issuers and regional governments to offer consumers access to credential wallets, pathway and career planning services, and regional talent marketplaces. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos listed: Learning Economy Foundation, iQ4, Digital Credentials Consortium, EBSCOed, Research Improving People’s Lives, Trinsic
LER Technical Standards: Technical standards define norms and requirements for how data needs to be structured so that it can be interoperable across different technologies. These technical standards describe a method for packaging information about accomplishments, embedding it into portable files and including resources for web-based validation and verification.
Logos listed: 1EdTech, World Wide Web Consortium, OpenID, HR Open Standards, DIF
Metadata Frameworks & Libraries: These semantic layers provide a linked data structure to include rich information about a credential within the LER technical standards. This data may include a rich skill description to articulate specifics about skills obtained by a learner in earning a credential, or information about how long it took to earn a credential, the transfer value of a credential, and how it prepares the learner to earn other credentials. (New to 2024 SmartReport)
Logos listed: Open RSD, Open Skills Network, Credential Engine
Credential Wallets: Credential wallets provide a consumer application to store and share LER credentials. Consumers can aggregate their LER credentials in one place and share them from the wallet into other applications or directly with other individuals.
Logos listed: SmartResume, LearnCard, RANDA Solutions, Canvas Credentials, Territorium, Veres, Pocket, Velocity, Indiana Achievement Wallet, Greenlight, Credly
Verifiable Credential Exchange Network: A purpose-built decentralized protocol and blockchain network that serves an ecosystem of organizations and individuals as an infrastructure for the exchange of verifiable, trusted and globally interoperable self-sovereign career credentials. It usually includes low-code developer-ready APIs and agents that embed the network protocols and enable ecosystem participants to easily connect their systems to the network and become fully interoperable with all other ecosystem participants. (New to SmartReport in 2024)
Logo listed: Velocity Network
HR Information Systems/ATS: Human resources information systems are platforms that help businesses meet core HR needs, manage and serve their employees and track employee performance and development. ATS stands for Applicant Tracking Systems, which help employers manage their hiring process from inbound applications to tracking applicants through the interview process, to hiring. Some HRIS and ATS platforms plan to ingest LER data to drive better decision making for their core capabilities.
Logos listed: Jobvite, Infor
LER Talent Marketplace Platforms: Talent Marketplaces aggregate job seekers, help them build talent profiles, and make job seekers discoverable to employers. Talent Marketplaces in this ecosystem enable job seekers to build talent profiles that include LER data, enabling richer talent profiles to be created. Companies in this box operate nationwide talent marketplaces and/or help different types of organizations operate their own talent marketplaces.
Logos listed: SmartResume, Credly
LER Regional Talent Marketplaces: Regional Talent Marketplaces typically leverage 3rd party technology to operate a talent marketplace that leverages LER data, or contract with LER Tech Solution Developers to develop proprietary technology. These regional marketplaces are often operated by government entities.
Logos Listed: Arizona State University, Accelerate Montana, My Colorado Journey, Office of Workforce Strategy Connecticture, Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio, Alabama Talent Triad, Indiana Achievement Wallet, SkillStack (Idaho), Launch (Arkansas), Navajo Nation
Background Screening: Background Screening companies in the LER ecosystem leverage LER data in their process of verifying information about individuals. They provide a service to employers to verify the authenticity of claims made by potential employees, and to check for additional information that’s important to their hiring process.
Logo listed: Cisive
Pathway & Career Planning: Platforms that help an individual identify their current skills and abilities to discover careers their skills enable them to pursue. These platforms also help individuals identify how they can acquire skills over time to prepare to advance down different types of career paths. Platforms that consume LER data to provide these services make it easier for job seekers to get quality guidance and recommendations.
Logos listed: Launch (Arkansas), Udemy, Indiana Achievement Wallet
The Top 10 LER Trends of 2024 - To build the SmartReport I needed to dig deeply into every corner of the LER ecosystem. And I had the good fortune to interview some of the smartest people in the business.
Learn & Work Ecosystem Library - a web-based library that collects, curates, and coordinates resources to support the learn-and-work-ecosystem
T3 Network’s LER Ecosystem Map - a tool for all those involved, and those who want to be involved, in building this LER future.
Credential Engine’s Counting Credentials Report - a view into the growth of credential programs and LER data in the United States.
2024 SmartReport v.2.0 - The LER Ecosystem © 2024 by Ian Davidson is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0
