This week, as the United Nations marks its 80th General Assembly in New York City, the education and workforce community faces a sobering truth: we are just five years away from the deadline for meeting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and the goal of “quality education” for all remains stubbornly out of reach.
Despite decades of investment, billions of learners remain excluded from opportunity not because of a lack of ability, but because their skills remain invisible to the systems that govern access to jobs, education, and civic life. A diploma, for instance, may open doors, but what about the warehouse worker who mastered supply chain logistics on the job? Or the refugee who learned a new language while navigating resettlement? Or the veteran whose years of experience in crisis response and problem solving is overlooked because they lack a civilian job title to match? These forms of learning too often go unrecognized, effectively locking people out of the formal economy.
A wave of digital credentials, job-matching platforms, and AI-powered edtech apps have rushed in, each promising to be “the solution.” But every government, nonprofit, and company behind them tends to design for its own priorities, and often its own proprietary advantage. The result is a fragmented landscape with little portability. What’s missing isn’t another app or platform; it’s the connective tissue that makes cross-platform learning visible and transferable.
What we need is connective tissue—a universal way for individuals to carry their skills across borders, schools, and workplaces. That is the promise of the Lifelong Learning Passport, launched on Monday at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) by a coalition of more than 50 global partners.
The Lifelong Learning Passport is a secure, portable, interoperable wallet that allows individuals to own and share their skills, credentials, and experiences across their lifetimes. It combines open-source digital identity technology with AI-enabled insights to connect learning to opportunity—whether that’s applying for a job, enrolling in a training program, or demonstrating mastery of a new skill acquired informally. Crucially, the system is designed as a global public good: open, interoperable, and governed through shared open standards rather than locked up in proprietary systems.
Of course, skepticism is warranted. Some worry that a global skills passport could become a new form of surveillance, concentrating power in the hands of governments or corporations. Others fear it will deepen inequality by privileging those with the digital access to build and manage their records. These are real concerns, and they underscore why the governance of such infrastructure must be radically transparent, privacy-preserving, and accountable to the public interest. Without those safeguards, a tool meant to democratize opportunity could easily reinforce the very inequities it seeks to dismantle.
But the alternative—clinging to our current broken and extractive system—is far worse. Today, learning data all-too-often remains trapped in walled gardens. A student who leaves college short of a degree carries little formal recognition of their progress. Skills gained in apprenticeships or bootcamps are inconsistently valued by employers, if valued at all. Informal learning—the podcasts, workshops, video games, community service, and lived experiences that shape so much of what we know—remains invisible. In an economy defined by rapid technological change, failing to recognize and connect these experiences is not just unfair; it’s economically and civically self-defeating.
Consider the labor market mismatch: millions of jobs go unfilled while millions of workers remain sidelined. A major reason is not a lack of skills, but a lack of ways to translate and verify them. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that nearly 60% of the workforce globally will need reskilling or upskilling by 2030. Yet our current credentialing systems are too slow, too rigid, and too fragmented to keep pace. A Lifelong Learning Passport offers the connective infrastructure to bridge that gap—turning invisible learning into visible opportunity.
It is important to be clear: a passport will not, on its own, fix underfunded schools, bridge the digital divide, or guarantee fair wages. But it offers something foundational: a shared system for recognizing and connecting what people know and can do with the opportunities that allow them to thrive amid uncertainty. Without such connective infrastructure, even the most ambitious reskilling efforts risk crumbling under the weight of their own fragmentation.
The question is not whether these systems will emerge—governments and companies are already building them. The real question is: will they serve the public good, or private interests? The choice is ours, and it must be made now.
Taylor Kendal is president of the Learning Economy Foundation, a nonprofit that is building the Lifelong Learning Passport along with a group of 50 global partners.