What does the word 'learner' mean to you today - and compared to 5 years ago? What about in 5 years from now? As the world of work has changed, so learners too - significantly in some respects. In our new blog series, Lens on Learners, we'll take a deep dive into what learners look like today, what their needs are now and in the future and how the modern credential marketplace is meeting the needs of the new global economy.

Throughout this series, the same questions have come up again and again. We aren’t going to pretend to have all the answers. And in outlining these ‘wicked problems’, we’re not saying that there is no work currently being done to address them: there is. In this final piece, we seek to highlight not only how far we’ve come... but the distance we have yet to go.

We all know there’s a skills gap. It’s real, it’s a problem, and it’s time that we move beyond talking about what it is, how large it is and why it matters to a more important topic - what do we do about it? 

We must define employability, and understand that being employable does not equal being employed. The two terms are often used interchangeably and are confused with one another. But they are different, and that difference is related to the very purpose of teaching 21st-century skills in the first place. 

While it would be great to have a federal or even global framework, because of the needs of different organizations, any framework must be adapted to meet their needs. Let’s look at the purpose of frameworks, flexibility, funding, and what it all means when we put it together.

Definition of the terms ‘skills’ and ‘competencies’ in conjunction with ‘capability’ are vital to developing any framework against which a person can be assessed and matched to a particular position or career path. 

Edalex recently had the opportunity to support research that Emeritus Professor Beverley Oliver conducted on the topic of employability, culminating in the release of the whitepaper Rethinking Employability Beyond 2020: Ten Recommendations for Universities.

For many credential badges, it’s not clear what underlying skills or knowledge the micro-credential represents. What makes digital credentials meaningful in the current global economy? In this blog post, Dan McFadyen, Managing Director of Edalex, shares part of his personal journey that ultimately led to the development of the world’s first Credential Evidence Platform - the award-winning Credentialate platform.

Technology continues to transform the workplace and the way we learn. We now know that there is an increased demand for individual professional learning coupled with employers’ needs for tools to personalise learning and make it meet broader goals. This trend has driven growth in competency-based learning and skill-based credentials that in turn appear to have contributed to the rise of digital micro-credentials.