What happens to the average learner when they graduate from high school or a degree program? Their “real” learning often starts. Without proven skills and experience, they enter the workforce at entry-level jobs they may be overqualified for, or worse, they get passed up for positions they may be a great fit for.
Not only do the learners lose, so do employers. So how can we provision learners with better life-ready signals, ones that employers and others can see, evaluate, and validate? It starts with the learner.
Defining Life-Ready Skills
First of all, it’s important that we define life-ready skills which translate to life-ready signals. There are some key skills learners need to have, that have been called a lot of things over the years; 21st-century skills, soft skills, readiness skills, durable skills and the latest, life-ready skills. They include:
- Self-awareness and self management
- Collaboration and communication
- Critical thinking and creativity
- Stress management
- Accepting criticism and negative feedback
- Problem solving and decision making
- Sympathy and empathy
First, we must understand that some of these skills can be taught, but it’s likely learners will have natural aptitude in one or more of these areas. One of the biggest keys to better equipping learners is self-awareness. We must help them to understand what they are good at, and what areas they may need to work harder on.
This self awareness also comes with the understanding that nearly all of these skills can be improved, but that they should focus on those areas where they have the greatest skill.
Once the learner understands those skills, how do they apply them, and how does that enable them to make decisions about their future?
The Application of Life-Ready Skills
As learners move forward in their lives and careers, they need the ability (and the knowledge) to evaluate the skills they already have – both “hard” and “soft” – to determine whether upskilling in their current career, taking a new career path, or even returning for more education is the wisest choice for them.
The key to this is data. In order to be able to shape their own stories, learners must first know and understand their stories. This means having a record to refer to and evaluate.
This is where Personal Evidence Records (PER) and Learner Employment Records (LER) come into the picture. These are the natural next step from resumes and curriculum vitae, providing learners more information than simple transcripts and degrees, and giving a more holistic picture of their lifelong learning and skills.
This is not a short-term outcome measurement like employability, although that certainly plays a role. This shift in thinking is toward lifelong sustainability regardless of career choices and changes that may happen along the way.
Jobs may be temporary, and lifelong careers may, in many cases, be a thing of the past, but skills are forever. Thus we’re equipping learners with long-term outcomes from their learning, higher education and other qualifications.
A skills-based PER/LER also has the advantage of creating more equity by default. Learners will be judged by their skills and abilities (ideally) rather than race, gender identity, and other factors that lead into diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Of course other human factors affect DEI, but equipping learners is a vital step in the process.
What Are Life-Ready Signals?
For us to understand life-ready signals, we must for a second talk about semiotics and the definition of terms. Because the term “life-ready skills” has evolved, so has the term “life-ready signals.”
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, of which language is a part. It depends partly on the object being described, but also on the way the person reading that description interprets it. For these terms to be meaningful, we all need to interpret them in the same way.
Life-ready skills are the thing being described. Life-ready signals are those “signs” being used to describe them. For a learner to tell their own story, they need to be equipped not only with the skills themselves, but the proper “signs” to share them with others in a meaningful way.
It’s also important to note here that with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) there will always be skills that machines will never master, and those are the life-ready skills we are discussing here.
These signs can be categorised and shown in a few different ways:
- Skills – these can be showcased by digital badges, skills testing, and even on the job performance. They can also be showcased by positions the learner has held, volunteer work they have done, and testimony from others in the form of letters of recommendation or performance reviews. In short, anything that “proves” a skill counts, beyond just a certificate or a degree.
- All learning counts – this follows from skills above. No matter how the learner has acquired the skill, whether that is through formal, informal or non-formal education, that learning still counts in this life-skills model. Proving the skill can be done in a variety of ways from experiences both inside the classroom and real world training. No learning goes to waste.
- Personal evidence records (PER) / Learner employment records (LER) – These records record, in a meaningful and verifiable way, the skills mentioned above. Anyone can claim to have a skill and even to have completed a course or received on the job training in various areas, but new technology like digital badges and other digital certifications allow these claims to be either verified or labelled as self-reported.
- Digital wallets – think of your Apple Wallet on your iPhone (or Google Wallet on your Android device) and the information held there. You can shop with credit cards without ever giving the vendor your card number through a simple Near Field Communications (NFC) device. Digital skills wallets work much the same: with a click of a button employers and others can verify the validity of information there, and the user can not only protect their privacy, but also have the ability to show others only what they want them to see.
This puts learners in control, while giving companies and HR departments better tools to truly move to skills-based hiring. The learner can now tell their own story, in whole or in part depending on circumstances, because they know, and have a record of, that story.
For learners, the lifelong learning pathways never end. Their PER/LER can be an eternally evolving document allowing them to tell their ongoing story. Those paths include:
- Upskilling / reskilling
- New career decisions
- Digital wallets
But there is more to the story. For these life-ready signals to be more visible, we need data. Someone has to connect the dots.
Connecting the Data Dots
How does all of this data get into a single place? Well, the same way your credit cards get into the wallet on your smartphone. It is unlikely all of those cards came from the same bank or creditor. You likely have also added things like movie passes and airline boarding passes to your wallet.
This means a device that, while verification is not held by that single entity, can house different types of digital verification from different sources. This means an interoperable interface (or more than one (similar to both Apple, Google, and Samsung wallets performing essentially the same functions) that users can utilise to house and share their skills information.
The wallet itself, however, is simply the envelope that holds your digital data – whether that be credit cards, movie passes or education credentials. It’s simply a container for information that enables storage, curation and sharing. It’s what you can put into digital wallets and what you can do with the items in your digital wallet that’s the really interesting part.
Education credentials are more commonly being issued in the form of digital certificates and badges. At this level, the course outcomes are listed, along with information about what was studied. Is this useful information? Yes, of course, but what about details of the individual learner’s achievements and strengths? These are not typically recognised. Simply that the learner attended and passed. Even with a grade assigned, such as the letter grade ‘A,’ what does this tell us about the learner? That they were able to complete a test well? Where did they excel? What skills did they learn? Let’s drill down a bit, to look at more personalised recognition.
Personal learning achievements can be recorded in a PER/LER, as described above. They contain personal-level achievement data and may contain qualitative and quantitative data. This is more useful information than that of the course information alone. But what about durable skills – those 21st-century skills so valued by employers and which send a strong life-ready signal? For these we need to drill down a bit deeper again.
Let’s take for example, the skill of Communication, which can be developed in multiple subjects within a course – say, an Accounting degree. Communication forms part of the curriculum in the subjects Accounting Reports and Analysis, Organisational Behaviour and Enterprise Performance Management. At the other end of the spectrum, in the final year of secondary education, communication can be found in the curriculum in the subjects English, Humanities and Social Studies and History. In each of these, the skill of communication is taught and can be assessed. But how do we connect this data and determine the level of their skill?
A learning management system (LMS) can recognise communication in each of these subjects, but only for the individual subject – not for the skill of communication across all of these subjects. Our skills-first platform Credentialate connects the data dots by connecting skills performance data (assessments), across all of these subjects, and giving the student an overall score of what level their communication skills are at, as measured against known educational and other frameworks. Credentialate then provides the learner with evidence of their skill achievements (assessments and artefacts) and level of skill (see the RSD section below) in the form of a personal evidence record.
How is the skill and the skill level described and demonstrated? For skills information to be useful, the data needs to be available in both human and machine-readable – and machine-actionable – format. One way we’re connecting data dots, is through rich skill descriptors (RSDs), which are packets of structured metadata, that provide greater context and meaning to skills. Here’s an example of an RSD for the skill of ‘Identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency.’ Listed within is a skill statement (providing a concise description of the skill) the author of the RSD, a list of relevant keywords, the permanent skill link (Skill ID), what the skill is aligned to (in this example, the Australian Skills Classification), relevant job categories, occupations this skill is used in and a list of standards – what level of sub-competencies are required to perform the overarching skill.
As you can see, this provides much more useful information to both learners and employers. Due to its permanent link, RSDs can be referenced in all sorts of digital resources, such as resumes, job descriptions, digital credentials, EdTech platforms, talent marketplaces and more. It acts as a third-party standardised description of the skill and skill level being recognised (for more, check out openRSD – our freely accessible, and usable, library of RSDs).
Now that we’ve drilled down to the skill level, let’s reverse our perspective and look at how connecting the skills data dots enables the skills-first economy of the future.
Breaking learning data down to the skills level is like starting with individual Lego bricks. With these skills bricks (RSDs), you can build a personal record of a learner (PERs/LERs), providing a contextualised and holistic picture of their individual strengths and that shows them and provides them with evidence of what they know and can do. Upon this personal record, their education records can be built (digital badges), outlining the learning activities they have undertaken to develop their skills.
And finally, you provision them with the means to curate collections of evidence (digital wallets), which can then be shared with prospective employers, further education institutions, volunteer organisations or wherever else their life takes them. Able to demonstrate they are career and life-ready and giving them the ability to signal their readiness to others in a secure, personalised and verifiable way.
These are just two things that we can help educators provide learners with. The advent of learner-centricity however, gives rise to some further questions for us to consider…
How do We Know When We are Making a Difference to Learners?
We need to ask some questions that, while they may appear simple, are more complex to answer than they initially appear:
- What should we be measuring and why? We know what we are measuring now, to an extent, but is that an effective strategy? Are there more ways to look at education outcomes from a secondary level to a collegiate level? The answer is yes, and we need to dig deeper.
- Are we measuring the right things? What do employment outcomes really mean? Should we be measuring learner confidence? Their ability to tell their stories? Whether or not they are motivated in their chosen fields, or even toward employability or further education? These measurements will differ from learner to learner, level of schooling, and career situation. But we should ask what we mean by career readiness anyway.
We should likely be looking at all of the above. The key is how we answer these questions and measure these outcomes.
Fortunately, this is an area where research and activity are continuing. But the simple fact is that it comes down to a key shift.
That shift ultimately comes down to being learner centric and giving them the tools – and evidence – to make better decisions about their lives. This involves making education relevant for learners now and in the future, including revisiting the value higher education brings, and making changes to ensure sustainability for all learners. For they will return to education regularly, whether that is formal, informal or through workplace certifications.These are all keys to making lifelong learners, and provisioning them with better life-ready signals. Ready to start a conversation about how we can help you move toward these goals? Contact us here at Edalex. We’d love to hear from you.
