This report by Brandon Muramatsu, Philipp Schmidt and DISCO VET partner Anthony F. Camilleri (Knowledge Innovation Centre), attempts to map the space that exists between the promise of digital credentials that represent skills, competencies and abilities and their widespread adoption in employment–related use cases. It is based on a set of semi–structured interviews with leading experts and decision makers in North America and Europe, desk research and expert analysis.
The research identifies a complex ecosystem of stakeholders that goes beyond simply dividingstakeholders into issuers, holders and validators or educational institutions, learners and employers. Each of these groups is diverse, and different sub–groups have different relationships with credentials—implying that they often will not face the same problems or require the same solutions.
It finds that employers see potential value in using digital credentials for a number of different reasons. These include using digital credentials to better match candidates to jobs by analyzing their skills, broadening the talent funnel by data–mining credential databases, ensuring the authenticity of credentials, and using credentials to manage the talent pathways in their organizations.
At the same time, adoption remains limited. Our conversations indicate that there is no one
obstacle whose removal would suddenly supercharge digital credential adoption. Rather limited adoption is a function of a complex set of economic, political, technical and cultural factors. We make a series of recommendations that, together, can lead to more widespread adoption
