Traci Marques now spends a lot of her days at Pikes Peak Workforce Center evangelizing skills-based hiring and a modern version of the resume.

As executive director and CEO, she’s one of a number of workforce leaders across Colorado at the frontlines of getting employers and jobseekers to adopt new digital learning and employment records, or LERs, that the state sees as the wave of the future. 

The work is part of a foundation-led collaborative called SkillsFWD that is working with organizations in seven different states. The goal is for each grantee to demonstrate how they might create a statewide system for LERs that can eventually be used across state borders. As of September, nearly 170K learners and earners have been enrolled to accept LERs with 304 employers registered.

Of all the grantees, the Colorado Workforce Development Council project is among the most ambitious and furthest ahead, in part because it is attempting to integrate LERs with MyColorado, a widely used digital wallet that contains digital driver’s licenses and vaccine records. 

The Big Idea: Under the leadership of Governor Jared Polis, the state is garnering a reputation as a leader in pushing skills-based hiring. Colorado had previously piloted statewide LERs for educators, and with the SkillsFWD grant, they’re taking on a more complex industry: healthcare. If they succeed, they could become a model for the rest of the country. 

For now, they are in the early stages of talking to employers, learning what their needs and concerns are, and figuring out how to get everyone—large corporations and small rural hospitals alike—on board. 

In recent years, LERs have been a significant focus of policymakers and reformers who are interested in how better organized and more accessible data can power economic mobility. The digital records have the potential to verify credentials in an age where it’s easier and easier to fake a resume thanks to advances in AI. LERs could also help level the playing field by emphasizing skills rather than credentials only, meaning, for example, that someone without a bachelor’s degree but with 30 years of experience could verify their qualifications for a job. 

But LERs mostly sit at the experimentation phase. Lately though, a few initiatives—like the Talent Marketplace in Alabama—have attempted a much wider scale. The Colorado initiative and a few of its sister SkillsFWD projects are aiming to be next. If they succeed, experts say, it will not necessarily be because of the tech, but because they managed to change behavior.

Building New Entry Points

The Details: ColoradoFWD, as the project is now called, is about halfway through its 18-month pilot demonstration to create a skills-based ecosystem that uses LERs. Renise Walker, assistant director of systems innovation at the Colorado Workforce Development Council and project lead for ColoradoFWD, says the council chose to focus on behavioral health care and direct care to address shortages across the state. The jobs involved include social workers, nursing assistants, and patient care techs. 

“It’s an industry that has very few entry points,” Walker says. “The demonstration is a way to look at how we can leverage the ability to verify and describe skills that people are developing as one way to chip away at the behavioral health talent shortages in the state.”

The project has the support of the governor’s office as well.

“Colorado is committed to skills-based hiring as a state, and LERs are one way high-quality talent can communicate the skills they’ve accumulated to employers,” says Shelby Wieman, the governor’s press secretary. “We are excited to be trying out new and innovative approaches that connect Coloradans to good-paying jobs.”

Winning Hearts and Minds

Even with the support of state leaders, getting an LER project off the ground comes with myriad hurdles and buy-in challenges. While creating and adopting the technology itself is a challenge, the project leaders must also tackle cultural issues, says Kelly Page, a consultant hired to help lead the initiative’s employer engagement efforts. Page likens the change to the adoption of email a generation ago.

“It’s like pre-email, when they said that it would change communication and letter writing and the use of faxes, and we didn’t know until we actually used it 20 years later,” Page says. “It’s about recognizing where we are in the innovation cycle. We’re very early stage innovation, and we’re not even at adoption yet. We’re at acceptance and understanding. Our hope is wide-scale adoption.”

Employers First: Page has spent countless hours talking with employers big and small about what LERs are and how they can benefit from them—well before getting into the specifics of implementing the new technology. In some ways, smaller and rural organizations have been more receptive due to their nimbleness. With larger organizations, it’s difficult without the endorsement of the CEO. 

One reason the messaging has been challenging is that the process for validating healthcare credentials is complex and not necessarily uniform across companies, unlike in education, for which Colorado has already integrated LERs. Walker says it feels like the state had to start from scratch. 

“We were talking with an employer who had 17 different validation systems they were using to just vet a person,” she says. 

“We really do see long-term opportunity in this, but it’s an uphill battle. There’s a lot of trust and confidence that has to be built in behavioral health specifically, or healthcare more broadly, to really be able to make the transition to technologies that we think can help to streamline that a bit.”

The sheer number of players that need to be at the table also makes working in healthcare a bigger lift. So far, ColoradoFWD has focused on getting employer buy-in, but the leaders will also need to get the Medicare system to the table—something they didn’t anticipate but that employers are insisting is essential.

The Rise of AI: SkillsFWD executive director Dawn Karber says she anticipates it getting easier to get employer buy-in in the near future as employers struggle more with AI-generated resumes and cover letters that don’t tell the full story about a job candidate. With the verification built into LERs, employers and HR managers can solve the headache of parsing out what’s real and what’s not. 

“LERs will actually be able to solve a portion of the issue,” Karber says.

Learning ‘A New Language’

In all the SkillsFWD projects, technology has been another significant challenge. Karber says selecting the right technology vendor is crucial, but in order to do that, grantees had to have a deep understanding of LERs and their goals. 

“At the heart of it, it’s about selecting a vendor, but it goes beyond that in that you have to learn the terms. It’s a new language,” Karber says. “You have to learn what it really is that you are asking for, what you need, and what you want to get, what results you’re seeking in the technology you’re purchasing.”

ColoradoFWD has chosen SpruceID as its tech vendor, which would help it build toward their goal of designing a multi-use digital wallet. Most other SkillsFWD projects are focused on building out technology for LERs alone, but Colorado’s approach mirrors the ambition of states like California, which recently integrated digital driver’s licenses with the Apple Wallet app.

On the Ground: Marques, the CEO at the Pikes Peak Workforce Center, has been helping educate businesses and job seekers about the benefits of LERs and skills-based hiring even as her own staff is being trained. They have to get up to speed on what LERs are and how to use AI and other new technologies in career navigation. 

“You can’t just roll out this platform and expect people to jump on board with it,” Marques says. “It’s about having constant training and information sessions on what the platform is, what it does, how it works, and answering questions that they may have as far as career pathways an LER can show.”

Marques tries to help employers and job seekers understand that LERs are part of the wave of the future, and they should get on board sooner rather than later—otherwise they might be left behind. The technology research firm Gartner recently predicted that by 2026, at least 500M smartphone users will be “regularly making verifiable claims using a digital identity wallet,” which will eventually include things such as educational and workplace qualifications, proof of employment, and even healthcare data.

“Technology is moving at such a rapid pace, and businesses need talent and people need jobs,” she says. “How do we connect them in a better way, looking at the skills they have?”

What’s Next

Each SkillsFWD project is in early stages, but the collaborative is already brainstorming ways to make LERs work across state lines and hiring data mobility experts to help them do so. They call this “interoperability”—making each LER system unique and responsive to its local population, but also flexible enough to work with a range of HR systems and LERs in other states. 

Colorado is paying a lot of attention to what other states, including other SkillsFWD grantees, are doing to make sure they are compatible and to learn from their experiences. Alabama, Arkansas, and Indiana are among those states exchanging information with Colorado. 

While international interoperability is not yet on the table for discussion, Page, who is an immigrant from Australia, is already thinking about it in Colorado’s future. 

“What happens if all your credentials have been verified, but they’re in Spanish?” she says. “What happens when you come to Colorado and it doesn’t have a multilingual system or service that can read Spanish credentials? We have the technology nowadays to overcome some of those things, but we as humans have to think differently about career pathways and the role of the employer, the issuer, the industry associations. It’s a big ecosystem.”

In the meantime, Colorado is pushing forward one step at a time. Walker credits a collaborative environment among K-12 and higher education, workforce boards, and Governor Polis’s office for making the progress they’ve made so far.

“There’s a willingness to go through some of the pain to test things out,” she says. “When you’re a first mover, you’re spending a lot more money and a lot more energy to figure it out. But there’s a willingness to do that in Colorado because I think we understand the purpose of what we can get to on the other side.”