When a university dean, registrar, or workforce-agency director sets out to buy digital credentialing technology—whether it be a platform for AI-enhanced assessment, student advising, skills intelligence, or case management—they enter a market almost entirely without a map. 

In most enterprise software categories, buyers can lean on an established layer of independent analysis to sort claims from reality. That barely exists for credentialing and skills-related software tools. Gartner, the usual first stop for IT procurement specialists in large corporations and nonprofits, offers virtually no coverage of digital credentialing platforms. Capterra, which pairs end-user reviews with expert commentary, has just a stub for Credly and a handful of other vendors. 

That leaves most of the field without any third-party validation. Instead, buyers have to rely on app-store ratings on Google Play and anonymous, unverifiable gripes on Glassdoor. That, or they turn to an AI chatbot, which will just synthesize the same thin reviews and marketing copy. 

The result is a discovery process that places too much burden on institutional decision-makers, leading to shortcuts that advantage the platforms with the largest marketing budgets.

Doing One’s Own Homework Has Limits

In the absence of an honest broker, higher education and workforce leaders have understandably tried to do the research themselves. But vendors seldom publish pricing or other critical information, steering prospects instead toward demos and sales conversations that yield a quote only after a serious investment of time and attention. In-person venues help but don’t solve the problem. Events such as Convergence, the credential-innovation conference jointly hosted by AACRAO and UPCEA, give postsecondary and workforce leaders who can afford the price of admission a chance to meet vendors face to face—yet those encounters still present a vendor-defined view of what a product can do.

This reliance on sales meetings rather than trusted, independent information disadvantages buyers and, less obviously, many sellers too. When prices and capabilities cannot be readily compared, the vendors with the most polished sales operations win the attention, even if lower-cost or specialized competitors would be the better option. Genuine comparison would give less-expensive products a shot, and public-sector and nonprofit organizations with limited budgets could put any savings toward their core missions. Better comparison tools also would surface open-source and noncommercial alternatives, which often deliver stronger interoperability—an advantage that, over time, lets organizations serve learners and workers better.

Nobody Can Solve This Problem Alone

No one actor can repair this alone. The most durable solution would draw on vendors, researchers, philanthropy, and buyers acting more or less in concert.

Vendors could start simply, by committing to transparency about their capabilities and about the outcomes their products have produced in real implementations. A voluntary seal (or, dare I suggest, a certification) could reward companies that conform to a common set of clear reporting metrics, which could be established by the research community to gauge each platform’s commitment to user experience, interoperability, and effectiveness. 

Metrics would certainly differ depending on the nature of a product, and head-to-head comparison of products might not always be feasible, but it should be possible to communicate which products are rated highly for quality and value by end users. A useful precedent already exists in an adjacent area of the field: the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) for years has performed a self-regulatory role for tech bootcamps by requiring members to report standardized, independently verified outcomes for their students.

Researchers have their own part to play. They can help define which elements of a credentialing platform ought to be transparent to the public in the first place, and, should the industry not embrace transparency on its own, field surveys or conduct qualitative studies to document what implementing these systems actually looks like on the ground. They can also play a valuable role in determining how quality and value are defined, and what reasonable quality metrics for credentialing platforms might look like. That work will need sustained backing from philanthropic funders, who have underwritten comparable efforts before. Buyers, meanwhile, should put collective pressure on analysts and review platforms like Gartner and Capterra to cover this category.

We’re Not Starting From Zero

The good news is that credentialing has been here before. The nondegree credentialing ecosystem has a real track record of transparency efforts—some more successful than others, but instructive either way. The Credential Transparency Initiative, co-founded by the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and now carried forward by Credential Engine, built shared infrastructure for describing credentials in comparable terms. The Educational Quality Outcomes Standards (EQOS) framework, managed by Jobs for the Future and the Burning Glass Institute, informs today’s Credential Value Index. And newer entrants like CredLens are linking credential data to administrative outcomes to show what credentials actually deliver in the labor market.

These efforts have chipped away at the chronic shortage of trustworthy, comparable information. Extending that work from credentials to the technology that issues, manages, and verifies them is the logical next step. The buyers making big-ticket purchases—and the workers whose opportunities ultimately hinge on those decisions—deserve a market where they can discern which products are good.

After all, purchasing decisions should rest on evidence, not on whoever had the best sales pitch.

Kyle Albert is director of the Program on Skills, Credentials, and Workforce Policy and an associate research professor at George Washington University.