The prevailing winds of hiring practice have continued to shift in the years since the pandemic. A half-decade ago, skills-based hiring began to gain traction as a way for employers to access untapped talent and redress longstanding gaps in labor market access. Since then, the practice has continued to evolve as business leaders work to translate theory into outcomes. Today, as employers navigate an unpredictable economy, they’re still working to find the right balance of skills-based and degree-based approaches to hiring.
Recognizing the talents of more than 70M Americans—half of the nation’s workforce—who are skilled through alternative routes such as military service, community college, certificate programs, and on-the-job training, as well as work and lived experience, is critically important. But these STARs, working adults without four-year college degrees, still must navigate a labor market where many workers face barriers to having their skills fully recognized.
For leaders of the skills-first movement, this situation gives rise to a pressing question: Where do we go from here?
Many organizations continue to take a deeply thoughtful approach to addressing this question. They remain committed to the critical and necessary work of translating people’s skills into job opportunities and career tracks. Yet the higher education and workforce spaces where this work is considered and analyzed tend to have one thing in common: They often prioritize taxonomies, ontologies, and frameworks to define the contours of the skills-first movement.
Those contours are critical to define. And a rigorous, systematic approach is an important part of building the foundation for any new field. But the success of the skills-first movement can’t rely on rigor alone. And what we see is a space that needs to emphasize the human element.
Despite all the productive conversations about the logistics and theories behind skills-based hiring, its importance is not always obvious to the people it’s intended to help—people who have bills to pay, children to raise, and family to care for, and who deserve to have meaningful careers whether or not they choose to pursue a four-year degree.
That’s a problem we can fix. To make the principles and goals of the skills-first movement more clear and more understandable to employees and employers alike, funders, research organizations, and workforce practitioners have to keep people and communities at the center of the work. This requires a plain-language case for opaque terms that play a critical role in driving economic opportunity but are often too esoteric to resonate with mainstream audiences. The ultimate goal, after all, should be to make it easy for people to show what they can do, easy for education and training providers to show what they can teach, easy for employers to describe the skills they’re seeking—and easy for these three groups to talk to and understand one another.
To illustrate, let’s look at some of the terms that have become popular across the skills-first community: credential transparency, skills validation, and durable skills.
Credential transparency isn’t a phrase that most people can parse without taking a few minutes to think about it. But at its core, it’s not so complicated. It’s about making information about credentials public, explainable, and clear so people can understand the cost, time, and value of each credential—and choose ones that help them get to where they want to go. Skills validation is the same way. It sounds pretty academic, but what it refers to is the process of understanding and evaluating someone’s skills to determine how well they can use those skills in a variety of contexts. And while nobody will tell you they go to school to learn durable skills, everybody can see the value that communication, problem-solving, reliability, and adaptability have in the world of work.
It’s clear how these terms came about and why they matter. But they’re much more focused on the ideas than on the people. Could we supplement them with phrases or ideas that people outside the skills-first bubble could understand? For credential transparency, “know before you go.” For skills validation, “show what you know.” This isn’t about dumbing these ideas down. It’s about remembering why we’re doing all this work in the first place, and crafting the language appropriately.
That commitment to recognizing and validating the skills people bring to the table is why Walmart has supported skills-based advancement for so many years. And it’s why we’re supporting a new initiative led by national nonprofit Education Design Lab, in technical partnership with Credential Engine, that’s attempting to continue the momentum of the skills-first ecosystem and create new opportunities for STARs. Participating organizations will develop innovative ways of examining credential quality, transparency, and skills validation (or whatever terms we end up using!), and many of them will focus specifically on so-called durable skills. They will strive to increase the visibility of skills, make credentials comparable, create consistency in quality signals across systems, and give STARs and other working adults a clear, viable, and trustworthy way to show what they can do.
If skills are more visible, validated, trusted, and transferable—and if the terminology around them is easier to understand—the skills-first movement can open up more and better opportunities that are accessible to everyone who wants them.
As AI reshapes the workplace and companies work to balance traditional credentials with emerging approaches to recognizing skills, the future of the skills-first movement will depend not just on building the right frameworks and strengthening the research base. It will also depend on describing the work in plain language that employers, policymakers, and STARs themselves can understand and act on. That’s the sort of human-centered work that can fulfill the mission of the skills-first community: helping employers connect with skilled talent and expanding economic opportunity for workers across the country.
Kirstie Sims is group director for retail opportunity at the Walmart Foundation.
Editor’s Note: Walmart Foundation is a funder of Work Shift. Publication decisions are based solely on our editor’s news judgement, and you can read our full policy on editorial independence here.