Why Skills Still Can't Travel Between Education and Employment

Learning means a lot of things, and plenty of it happens outside of a traditional classroom. Someone can teach themselves to fix a car from videos, run a volunteer project that demands more real management than a management course, or learn more from an internship than any class in their last semester. How much of that makes it to an academic record or is easily translated for an employer looking for those skills?

Sean Murphy works in that gap. He's the director of workforce and post-secondary pathways at the Bipartisan Policy Center; he came to it from a local workforce board placing veterans and justice-involved youth, staff jobs for a US senator and a governor, and corporate philanthropy at Walmart. Most people working on this problem talk about breaking down silos, but Sean thinks silos naturally occur in all systems. He says, "That's just the reality of people, right? And that's okay. We just need to figure out how do we build better bridges."

The four parts of a talent system that works

Sean's version of the system covers everything, meaning the public workforce system, education, and employers together over any one of them alone. It has four moving parts.

• Someone has to understand what the job demand actually is.
• The system has to recognize what skills people already have.
• It has to tell them clearly where their gaps are and how to fill them.
• It has to match them to opportunity.

There’s not a single-partner solution for solving every part. Education has to be at the table. Employers have to be transparent, which means rewriting job descriptions so they spell out the tasks and skills a role actually requires. Then they have to articulate, either through industry associations or on their own, what they'll need in three to five years. Training providers carry a piece of it too.

Any talent system built to last and serve everyone within it needs to sustain these four parts, even when disruption shows up, whether from a national shift due to innovation, a plant opening or closing in one town, or one person's career screeching to a halt due to layoffs.

Running underneath all four is data.

Why data built for compliance fails the people it's meant to serve

"Data is not always sexy to most people," Sean said. "I get excited by it, but it's just not. It's the boring stuff behind the cool AI. It's the boring stuff behind big policy decisions."

Most of the workforce data we have was built for compliance. It reports upward, feeding research and informing government decision-making, but it was never designed to serve the worker or the employer trying to use it. Sean saw that gap up close in the public workforce system, watching counselors do remarkable work with individuals while lacking the tools to reach more of them or to personalize what they offered.

At Walmart, Sean sat on the data work group for the commission behind BPC's report, A Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work. He's proud of how much of the final report centers on data, and equally clear that the next round has to go deeper, specifically by putting workers and employers at the center of the data work, not just treating them as its subjects.

There's also a discipline problem he runs into. "There's a lot of dialogue that I'm in where everyone just says, well, we need more data." His response is one question: for what? Until you can say who you're serving, what data serves them, and what tools can realistically produce it inside the systems you already have, more data isn't a plan. Nobody gets to turn off the lights on the old system and switch on a new one tomorrow, so any answer has to work inside what exists while it evolves and changes.

What digital credentials still leave out

Sean's senior year of college was, by his description, a dream. One quarter in DC interning for a US senator. One quarter in Olympia at the state legislature. One quarter abroad.

His transcript says 15 credits a quarter.

"It doesn't talk about really those internships. It doesn't really talk about what I learned in being abroad for a quarter," he said. "It doesn't tell an accurate story." The institution handed him the experiences that launched his career, then handed him a document that mentions none of them and left the explaining, the connecting the dots, to him.

Digital badges were supposed to close that gap; a badge can carry a lot of information. In practice, Sean said, most carry three things: the name of the school, the name of the program, and the date you finished. This tends to mean that the value tracks the reputation of the institution rather than anything you learned while there. Sean has a couple of well-known schools on his own record and no complaints about them, but as he said, “just because I went there doesn't mean I know more than somebody else.”

People tell him they're running a badging program. "First of all, it's not a badging program. A badge is merely the format in which you share the information. It's not the actual program. You can have a credential without a badge. You cannot have a badge without a credential."

His test is whether the credential connects to anything. A badge has to flow into the systems where decisions get made: HR platforms for job applications, student information systems for admission to the next program, career navigation platforms, and state talent marketplaces people use to find work. Without that, he said, a digital badge is "really no different than the credential that you printed off and you put on your mom's fridge."

That's the work he engaged in at Walmart starting in 2019, after the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board turned attention toward learning and employment records. The list of organizations he backed in his work managing grant portfolios runs long, including the US Chamber Foundation, 1EdTech, Credential Engine, the Competency-Based Education Network, and the Digital Credentials Consortium. Philanthropy could test ideas that government money can't. The catch, as he puts it, is that philanthropy struggles to spread what works, which is part of why he's back in policy.

Why the skills-based hiring headlines outpaced the hiring

For a while, the headlines were everywhere. Major employers were pulling degree requirements off job postings. Then the hiring practice came in well behind what the announcements implied.

Sean's explanation is that a degree is a proxy for skills, and it's the one that's legally defensible. He pointed to a framing Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has used. Hire someone with a degree and they don't work out, and nobody blames you. Hire someone without one, on the strength of their skills, and they don't work out, and maybe that's on you.

"We've got to realize that everyone's been skills-based forever," Sean said. Hiring has always been about skills. What's new is validated skills, and a wider set of proxies, from short-term credentials up through degrees, that can carry that validation.

Degrees stay central, but what changes is everything around them; people are learning across more modalities, teaching themselves in ways that didn't exist a decade ago, learning on the job, and needing new skills more often as innovation picks up speed. Skills also can't be discussed generically across every part of hiring. The people doing workforce planning need to talk about them differently from the people doing the hiring, with real overlap between the two.

Skills are "a language of learning, employment, and service." A way to communicate what you've learned so that it transfers to someone else. He is emphatic that this doesn't replace the degree, and equally emphatic that adopting it means real change management across every system involved, not just swapping one for another.

The people in the middle

BPC's goal is that every adult gets the skills and credentials they need, but “every adult” is a very different population from every 18-year-old.

Here's how he describes where the money goes. We spend a lot preparing people to learn how to learn, across K-12 and post-secondary. We spend a decent amount on people who are out of work. Between those two states, he said, "we leave it up to chance for everybody in the middle." Everyone in that middle is left to explain for themselves what they can do, what they've done, and what they think they could do next.

Some of that will always fall to the individual. But a lot gets lost in translation, and a lot of people never get connected to the right job or the right training when it would have mattered.

His alternative is that institutions stay in the relationship. Some of that is direct teaching, online or in a classroom. Some of it is validating learning that happened somewhere else, like a volunteer project, and translating that into experience that an employer can defend

It also opens post-secondary institutions to a new set of dollars, and Sean floated a version he clearly enjoys: instead of asking him for alumni money after he already paid a great deal of it, sell him a subscription to keep learning and to keep having his skills validated.

What institutions can start now instead of waiting on legislation

Federal legislation does not move quickly. So what does a registrar's office or a single CTE program do this semester?

Sean's answer starts with the recognition that there’s no blueprint and no silver bullet. Some recommendations become federal legislation. Some become agency implementation. Some are simply things partners in the community can go do without waiting for anyone.

He named places where the work is already happening.

• AACRAO has been pulling registrars together around data and comprehensive learning records.
• ACE is deep in credit for prior learning, an area where multiple organizations are working without shared definitions yet.
• Credential Engine is building out credential registries, which will need robust, collaborative data to work.
• Ten states have federal funding to build talent marketplaces, and others that weren't selected or didn't apply are building anyway, California among them.

But his advice for people who want to be involved in this work is just to start: look outward at who's already doing the work, then ask what you need to examine internally and build into your strategy. Who are the stakeholders inside your institution? This isn't the registrar's job alone. Are you issuing digital records that carry a deeper, richer set of information about students? Are you doing it in a way that's interoperable across systems, using the right data standards?

The politics of policy

Sean believes everyone in a leadership position wants to see people succeed, and that the real divisions in workforce policy run rural to urban and east to west at least as often as left to right. When something stalls, he thinks the cause is usually process rather than opposition.

He points to evidence like the short-term Pell passing after genuine party disagreement about how it should work. The MATCH Act was passed with overwhelming support from committee.

What moves things, he argues, is clarity. Know who you're serving. Say what problem you're solving. Back it with proven models where they exist and promising ones where they don't, then show the path from here to there.

Listen to the full conversation with Sean Murphy on the latest episode of Educast 3000.