ADvancing Workforce Mobility
Building credential transparency and skills-validation infrastructure so learners can clearly signal their skills, employers can confidently hire for them, and communities can unlock more equitable, career-aligned mobility.
How might we make workers’ skills and credentials more visible, trusted, and transferable across education and workforce systems so STARs can access real career mobility?
OVERVIEW
Advancing Workforce Mobility is an 18‑month initiative led by Education Design Lab, in collaboration with Credential Engine and with support by Walmart, to fund and coach regional projects that make workers’ skills and credentials more visible, trusted, and transferable across the learn+work ecosystem. Through grants of up to $600,000, the Lab is partnering with 10 U.S.-based nonprofits and public entities to design and test credential transparency and skills-validation solutions that help STARs (workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes) navigate a fragmented marketplace, connect to quality jobs, and achieve more equitable career mobility.
Too many workers have the skills employers need, but lack clear, trusted ways to demonstrate them…these grantees are building solutions that change that — from credentialing the informal expertise of California janitors to making military training legible to civilian employers to professionalizing an entirely new first-responder workforce. This is what it looks like to move from talking about skills-based hiring to actually building the infrastructure for it.
Tara Laughlin
Director of Skills Visibility at Education Design Lab
IMPACT
We don’t just design programs — we design for system-level impact.
We change systems by centering New Majority Learners in a collaborative process that results in a ripple effect of transformation across multiple levels, from individual programs and colleges, to regions and state systems.
We measure progress through four elements of change that signal system transformation:
