State Efforts to Advance Credentialing & Career Pathways

What role can states play in advancing the credentialing ecosystem? In this episode, we speak with Nick Moore, Education Policy Advisor & Director from the Alabama Governor’s Office, to learn how Alabama is revolutionizing credentialing and career pathways to further educational and economic mobility.

Transcript

Matthew Sterenberg (00:01.632)

All right, I’m here with Nick Moore. Nick, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a little bit more about your role and about the work you’re doing in Alabama.

Nick Moore (00:12.29)

Well, thanks so much. And it is a pleasure to be with you, Matt, and really appreciate your thought leadership in this space. And it’s exciting time, I think, in the world of blurring the lines between earning and learning. And part of a lot of the rapid developments that we’ve seen in the workforce development space in the last couple of years has been the result of us taking advantage of tech stacks that are becoming

online and working to write the language for what is the common denominator, the DNA of our talent development system. We believe that skills, but we need to make sure that we’re using a common taxonomy and ontology for describing those skills. And so what we’re doing is leveraging neural networks, large language models and machine learning to take all of

Discrete learning assertions that are out there that have heretofore served as proxies for learning and make it very difficult to formalize informal learning assertions and then to break those down to their basic layers of competency statements. And then we can build those back up. so credentials all of a sudden just become the wrapper by which we vouch safe.

various bundles of competencies. And then that also opens up a way for us to disaggregate a, for example, a course or a degree program into various components, micro credentials, and then bundle that back up, but also to take forms of learning that have been very hard to formalize, such

things that people learn on the job or things that people may have learned as a self -employed individual. Or even if you think about veterans with all of the skills that they’ve mastered in their military occupation, specialization, sometimes are difficult to translate into a civilian competency or description. So those are some things that we are doing, but a lot of it begins with the fundamental work of organizing.

Nick Moore (02:31.444)

employers and sectoral partnerships of coming up with an iterative and codified process for first figuring out what are the jobs that are in demand? How are we going to figure out using our primary LMI and other qualitative factors, how to reach consensus on the jobs that are in demand? And then what are the DNA of those in demand jobs? How do we build up industry level agreement on what a lot of people call

ready to work, employability skills, then sector specific skills. And then how do we, using these large language models, make job descriptions that can be customized so that when we put something out there like we’ve done in this past year, the nation’s first full scale talent development system that consists of a LER, credential registry, and skills -based job description, we’re then able to operationalize the work I’m describing and do it at scale.

And that’s why I think there is this Gordian knot or paradox of there’s so much interest nationally in skills -based hiring and competency -based learning, but we just haven’t seen those things in practice reaching scale. And part of that is the need to develop technology so that we’re not doing duplicative data entry and also solving for some of the other issues that don’t get as much attention.

But for example, how do you make skills assessments that can validate skills but not go awry of things like disparate impact rules through EEOC? So we think we can get at that and we’re not certainly at the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning. And I think the next couple of years will, I think flesh out the marketplace, particularly for talent systems. And you will see, I believe several regional

solutions reaching full saturation at the population level. And then I think we can begin talking about how do we reach national consensus, but we’re excited about the era of, I would say, creative destruction. And I tell a lot of people, our technology is improving at a geometric rather than arithmetic rate. So in many ways, this is a new asset class. It’s kind of like when the first

Nick Moore (04:52.564)

internal combustion engine automobile was created. Mercedes, there was a big delta between that and the Model T to where it became something that at scale society would decide to change the mode of transportation. Well, I think it’s very similar in terms of the education workforce community to where employers, as they see, they don’t have to throw out

system of record applicant tracking system and that institutions don’t have to replace their student information system. We are going to see not a full shift overnight away from time and credit -based learning, but a more of a blurring and an integration of credit and non -credit pathways. And I think that’s going to allow us to open up and democratize new pathways for learning.

Matthew Sterenberg (05:24.708)

you

Nick Moore (05:45.8)

And that’s what a lot of people are telling us in the post COVID environment is that we’re not turning our back on learning or work, but we do demand new ways of learning and being able to translate, transact and transcribe that learning in a self -sovereign, interoperable and portable way. And so we fundamentally think that the United States is the through line of this country has been about social, economic and geographic mobility.

Now we could spend all day talking about why that is, but part of the solution on reinvigorating that type of mobility is to allow people to own their learning and then to also have new systems of delivering workforce training that helps people to overcome benefit cliffs and other first and last dollar barriers that inhibit labor force participation. So this is not the panacea, but we think it is a necessary.

part of the formula for increasing our state’s labor force participation rate and post -secondary attainment rate. And we feel like we’ve got to do those things concurrently, just like in order to get there, we’ve got to scale skills -based hiring and competency -based learning.

Matthew Sterenberg (06:58.756)

You hit on a lot of things there. And one of the things I think is really interesting about the work you’re doing is the shift from 10 years ago, let’s say is it was get everybody to college, right? The Lumina foundation came out with their, I think it was like 60 by 2030. You know, we want 60 % of people to have some post -secondary credential. And that has changed a lot in the last several years because you have a lot of people

are in a lot of debt, right? Or are underemployed, right? And I think a lot of people are just waking up and realizing, the degree is not a golden ticket. And we’ve actually got to figure out, you mentioned proxies for learning, right? What do I actually learn once I have a degree? What do I know?

And for a while it was just bachelor’s degree required. And now we’re actually breaking that down and saying, what are the skills and competencies you have? How do we credential that in a different way? And the really cool thing is connecting to employment and labor. That to me, we’re so obsessed with credentialing. And this is coming from someone whose career has basically been working for a company that helps institutions credential, but we’re so obsessed with credentialing that we forget about what does it lead

Who cares? So what? But I am interested because there’s a lot of institutions that are doing this

Why is it important that states care about this? Why is it important? And what have you seen with the collaboration that you’re able to do at the state level? Walk me through how you move from like pockets of excellence. How are you able to get everybody to buy in and how is the state play a role? Because we all know that states are like laboratories for democracy, right? You’re testing things out. How do we make this broad? Why is it important for states to care about this? And what are the benefits you’ve seen?

Matthew Sterenberg (09:01.728)

leading from the governor’s

Nick Moore (09:05.228)

Well, you definitely need to create a reciprocal feedback loop between the supply and the demand sides of the talent ecosystem. And the state is placed to be able to generate those networking effects. So that we’re getting away from the, you know, build it and they will come model that we’re used to that is based more on the proclivities of accreditors

financial aid models and less about the discrete needs of employers and more regional or place -based setting. But it’s not to say that you put the employer up on a pedestal, they’re not the Oracle of Delphi, but that you do need to have a way for the needs of employers to be able to translate into program design. And so in 2019, we codified something called the Alabama Committee on Credentialing and Career Pathways. And

created a sectorial partnership for every industry, not just cherry picking five, but everyone, because we feel that if we’re going to make a shift or at least to better integrate informal and formal learning, credit and non -credit, that we needed to make these iterative. And one thing with employers is that we’ve got to make it about the bottom line and show how we’re going to save folks time and money.

but also not waste their time. You know, when, when we convene people that they also see that there is a true deliverable that comes out of that. And so that it’s not a, you know, an army of bureaucrats like me in some star chamber that’s telling employers, these are the jobs that are in demand.

Matthew Sterenberg (10:36.386)

Yeah, start doing all this work without any promise of getting better talent or retaining people, all that

Nick Moore (10:45.216)

Yeah, so that’s quickly demoralized. that’s the approach that I mean, so employer involvement is not just to check the box. mean, demand base really means that we’re leading with them in mind and that it is systematized and that we’re using the data models that, you know, so the, for one example, the employers come up with the stock job description and all the competency statements that go into that. And then in the talent triad,

Employers throughout the state can customize that so we can see the skill shape and the nuance how, you know, a certified production technician looks in aerospace versus shipbuilding versus automotive manufacturing. And I think the state also, and when the governor in the legislature involved in particular can also help to have the

players involved in this work understand what success and victory looks like. And so they’re not fighting for resources and relevance in a fog of war. And also it helps to keep focused on the strategy. And that’s particularly a role for the governor. It’s easy in state government or in any type of education workforce world for somebody to go to a conference and it’s the first time they’ve heard of something. And now all of sudden we’re going to go in a completely different direction.

So sometimes being able to stay the course, see something through implementation requires leadership. you know, there’s so much churn and turnover in state government and government at all levels that that is definitely tough to sustain things across transitions. So I’ve had the privilege of working for a governor who’s going to be in office for a total of 10 years by the end of her term. And that’s allowed us to get a lot of deep work done.

that, you know, had I had an 18 month or two year time horizon, like most people sitting in my role would have been very difficult to make some of the breakthroughs that we have done. So it’s leveraging that convening authority of the governor, but then also putting together a vision that can be sustained across time and administrations and then putting the processes in place to make

Nick Moore (13:02.446)

interaction between employers and education and training providers meaningful. And then taking things like labor force participation and post -secondary attainment goals and not just make those an aggregate number, but making those outcomes based so that we actually tie those to. So we’ve broken our attainment labor force goal down across 16 special populations, geographically and across sectors. And we’ve set targets and we’ve imbued these within our combined. We owe a plan.

so that our public workforce system, education and training provider, partners, human service providers throughout the system understand what targets they need to reach and how they need to partner. And so it creates the sense of need to have a little bit more of an evangelical approach, not in the religious sense, but in sense that in the world we’re living in with tight labor markets, but also low levels of labor force participation, the era of people sitting in their office, waiting for somebody to walk in the door.

that doesn’t work anymore. So we’ve got to have more virtual service delivery. We got to create trusted partnerships with communities that where we know people are that can be added to the labor force, but they need someone to be able to connect them with those opportunities. And that gets to know this other paradox that every employer I talked to has open jobs. And there’s a lot of people who

43 % of our population who are not working or going to school, not in the labor force. But we hear from them that they don’t understand where to find the jobs or the opportunities and the employers don’t know where to find the people. So there’s this level of information asymmetry that permeates the system and it creates a lot of slippage and leaks in the talent pipeline, particularly between transition points. So that’s part of the reason why we created the talent triad is to help

soften some of that just wasted effort in the public workforce system in

Matthew Sterenberg (15:09.425)

And I want to make sure we define that really well for people. So the talent triad is basically your relation to employers, right? The registry and then the learning and employment record. Is that a good summation of the

Nick Moore (15:19.512)

Yeah.

Nick Moore (15:27.394)

That’s right. And so it’s three solutions. That’s why we call it the triad, a credential registry, so that we reduce all learning assertions into their discrete competency statements. And the same technology that powers generative AI models helps us to power this, because we’re taking any number of unstructured data and the algorithms are trained to look at the shape of the letters. And

However, an employer describes a skill to be able to translate that into the norm competency statement and to do that almost instantly. And then to do the same thing with transcripts or self -attested skills or your LinkedIn or D profile, interoperate all that and translate that into a discrete skill statement in your LER. And that’s where the match happens between the employer job description and that individual’s LER profile. And it also removes a lot of the biases out of the HR process.

because you’re just getting matched with candidates based on their skill profile and people aren’t getting screened out because maybe they’re, you know, no one’s heard of their first name before and so on. And it also is going to help us reimagine the way that we do credit for prior learning so that when somebody presents at intake, we can have a statewide credit articulation index. It would award a certain number of credits based off of the profile of skills that someone

And then it’s also going to allow us to rethink the way that we do the unemployment insurance work search requirements. So rather than having to apply for three jobs a week, you could apply for every job that you have a competency match for within a certain threshold. And so it truly will, I think, provide the tech stack that has been needed to allow the world of work and education to communicate in terms of skills.

And then to do that in a way that doesn’t require everybody to do a duplicative data entry process or to have to replace their systems of record.

Matthew Sterenberg (17:28.718)

Yeah. What I really like about it is it’s creating a marketplace, right? Essentially here’s what I have. Here’s what I have to offer. Here’s what you’re looking for. Because like you said, so often people are saying, I can’t find the talent and the talent saying, I can’t find the job. And they really have no way to interact with each other. so this skills and competencies marketplace is the way it has to be done. And you can imagine how this

become more sophisticated over time. You think about it geographically, right? Give me everybody that has this skill and competency within this 30 mile radius with this salary requirement, someone who’s willing to work for this. Because if we don’t have a marketplace to exchange these things, then the credentials don’t have value. There’s no value if I have nowhere to exchange what I know with the opportunity that’s presented. And one phrase that I think

Nick Moore (18:05.058)

Yes.

Matthew Sterenberg (18:26.433)

This was you. I’m going to attribute it to you, Nick. think it was you. But when we spoke on a webinar a few years ago, you talked about wooden nickels. And I like history. So it always stuck out to me of just when we think about credentialing and micro credentialing and badging is a huge topic right now. But are we giving people something of value or are we just giving them something that might feel good at the time, but they can’t actually exchange for something?

That to me, what are we doing if we’re credentialing? And sometimes I think there’s like credential inflation to a degree where we’re trying to credential absolutely everything. And I’m like, well, you know, someone has to care about this for it to mean something, right? So I really like that methodology of it has to have value. How’s this going to translate? Tell me about the salary and the income implications of this. Have you thought

Like if I’m a learner in Alabama, do I know what, if I get these skills and competencies, what the salary expectations are? Cause as I’m going on my pathway, I want to know what it leads to. How are you working that in? So I don’t go and get my degree and I’m like, I didn’t know that they only made X salary a year. How are you translating that to the

Nick Moore (19:50.06)

Yeah, that’s a key point because something that we want to end is the notion of unrestricted customer choice. We need informed customer choice. And sometimes, whether it’s caseworkers or whether it’s financial aid counselors or guidance counselors, I almost feel like it’s their obligation to inhibit some data because they feel like, maybe people would

throw their hands up in the air and say, well, it’s going to take me 10 years to reach self -sufficiency. But we don’t believe that. We think that the more data and the more clear of a picture you could give somebody of their options, the better. And so we don’t take this deficit -based mindset. And the same thing on the employer side. No, we want employees to know.

all of their potential opportunities and we don’t want employers to fear like, well, we’re going to just lose all of our competition to this guy over here because he’s paying a quarter more. You know, iron sharpens iron. And when everybody has access to better information, the employers are going to be able to figure out exactly what they need to do to be able to retain and upscale people. And you’re just going to have a more nimble and loyal workforce over time.

and individuals who have access to better information aren’t going to inadvertently self -track into the lower wage job. So we’ve have also built out something that works in tandem with the triad. They’re both required for intake for the public workforce system in Alabama, a benefit cliff and self -sufficiency tool called David that allows people to understand what benefit cliffs they would hit or what wage thresholds they would hit along their continuum based on their family circumstances,

pathway and job that they choose. And then we also come up with a list of valuable credentials annually, we call the compendium of valuable credentials. And one of the criteria for making it on that list is to have at least a 20 % wage premium over high school diploma, but that’s just the floor, you know, we want that to be much higher in most cases. And so that is, I think, the most pure form

Nick Moore (22:05.726)

of accomplishing that is to make sure that we don’t suppress information and that we are working as part of the career counseling and guidance process to make sure that people have as much information as possible. But it’s also developing a model when we are doing training that has robust career counseling and navigation, access to post -secondary credit, you high quality non -degree credentials that

map to their competency statements and other stackable pathways. And then, you know, for there to be dual or concurrent post -secondary credit, but the work -based learning component is key. know, people that earn credentials that also participate in work -based learning are much less likely to be unemployed and are much more likely to be able to get connected directly with an employer right after completing training rather

going through a period of unemployment before they get matched up. we want, for that reason, we sort of tongue in cheek say that we want to go from graduation day for most students being unemployment day for them to have a more seamless transition to already be working and then for that post -secondary transition to be much more clear. And then for adults to have.

better opportunities to have multiple points of entry and exit so they can complete the next bundle in their pathway, realize a wage increase, and then jump back on the workforce pathway or highway. then whatever their terminal exit ramp is, that’s up to them to decide. But they can keep going as far as they want. And then even laterally or vertically transition into another sector opportunity.

Matthew Sterenberg (23:53.828)

Yeah, I like that perspective too, because I think we were like, you know, college first was the primary objective, you know, 10 years ago, certainly. And then the shift has happened to the trades, right? And it’s just like, it’s going to continue to shift based on whatever is most popular. And I feel like then became all right pathways. How do we put students in the right pathway? And it

Are you college, career or military? What’s your pathway? And a lot of states are trying to put students in a box. Like what track are you on? And the problem with that is it might get you to your next opportunity, but it’s not necessarily what you want to do 10 or 15 or 20 years from now. And so yeah, you can get a high paying job if you’re on the trades pathway or the career pathway while you’re in high school, but maybe you want to move into management.

You want to own your own company and there might be skills you want to. So it’s just, I don’t think we want to

I think you wanna have the flexibility, the stackability that you’re talking about of what do I need to get at every step of the way instead of just thinking about what my next step is. And that’s the problem with a lot of the Pathways conversation is, all right, I’m on the college pathway. Be like, yeah, but can we do both and, or can we think about what it looks like 10 or 15 years from now instead of just thinking about it as one handshake, one transaction?

Nick Moore (25:18.816)

Yeah, and I think that’s of an existential need for institutions, know, particularly community colleges and regionals and other smaller providers to make that switch. Because as the just sort of general proxy value in the labor market for formal credentials fades a little bit, it’s not going away. mean, and that labor market return

and premium for a bachelor’s degree in most fields will stay there. But we need to create more pathways for people to reach those credentials and then not find ourselves in this binary conversation, as you said, of and or. But I think blurring the lines and realizing that most people do operate in this world where it’s more of a gray scale. But we need that to be able to formalize. And heretofore,

It really hasn’t been necessary because of that proxy value has been so strong as a signaling mechanism. And then also just the technology hasn’t been there. But I think, you know, as institutions need to have more students, it’s not just a conversation about not enough 18 year olds, but I think in the post COVID environment, people are seeing that we’ve got to have, as we mentioned in the early part of our conversation programs that are more directly connected to the labor market.

And we’ve got to offer programs and modalities that meet students where they are and recognizing that there’s going to be a spectrum there of everything from the formal four -year residential model to somebody earning credit through PLA and then over a period of time working their way towards a long -term certificate or degree. But I think you’re absolutely right. mean, we’re going to continue to live in a world that as we over a period of time in the next decade shift to

more virtual service delivery, more competency based education. That is going to happen, but it will be through a coalition of the willing. And the more that those that are writing and ideating and thinking about these things in terms of that blurring of earning and work and formal and informal learning, I think that’s the sweet spot. And ultimately, I mean, if I look at my own career, if we think about our own pathways in life,

Nick Moore (27:45.966)

This notion of a static or wooden model of progressing from one job to the next is almost as hokey at this point as the adage of, you know, working 30 years somewhere and getting a gold watch at the end. mean, that, that, that world is only going to be true for a very few number of people going forward. So we’ve got to allow people to own their learning and to translate, transact and transcribe

and then take that with them and so that it’s not left behind some gatekeeping mechanism that whenever I move from high school to college that whatever system of record that they had to maintain my credentials, those need to follow me and be connected with me rather than just my institution. But we also need to be able to take your student information system and then validate those competencies instantly so that

registrar’s office isn’t having to operate under two systems if we really want this idea of a talent marketplace to reach

Matthew Sterenberg (28:47.788)

Nick, I really appreciate you joining me. I learned a lot. if you’re listening to this, check out the work that Alabama’s doing. Check out Credential Engine. Learn about a learning and employment record, prior learning assessment, work -based learning. You guys are really hitting on all the things that it’s very comprehensive is my point. So definitely check it out and really appreciate you stopping by the podcast.

Nick Moore (29:14.388)

Thank you sir, appreciate your partnership and I think you all have got your finger on the pulse of a lot of great work happening nationally so learn a lot by tuning in. Appreciate the opportunity to join you.

There’s always more to learn.