A Corporation for a Skilled Workforce-led team is creating a voluntary framework for quality credentials, supported by a grant from Lumina Foundation.
“Our goal is to develop common language and standards that make competency-based credentials more consistent and understandable across industries and schools,” said CSW Senior Policy Fellow Keith W. Bird. “We believe that increased transparency and portability will make credentials more valuable to employers, who will then use them in hiring and promotion because they accurately name competencies possessed by the holder. Currently, enormous numbers of credentials are issued, either by an industry, a certifying agency, or a school, but we have no consistent way of identifying those with real value. This work will play an important role in solving that problem.”
CSW’s lead partner in this project is CLASP, with whom CSW has collaborated for several years in advocating expansion of the use of competency-based credentials. In 2011, CLASP Director of Workforce Development Evelyn Ganzglass, former CLASP Senior Policy Analyst Heath Prince, and Dr. Bird wrote Giving Credit Where Credit is Due, which outlined the extensive use of non-credit education and the need and opportunity to create ways that learners earn meaningful credentials from their study. The project team also includes several national experts in credentialing.
A beta version of the Credentials Framework will be issued in Spring, 2015, to launch a testing period in which the CSW team will work with many partners to explore where the Framework can help improve the use of diverse credentials and to use feedback from further research and testing to improve the Framework. The beta Credentials Framework is organized into eight levels of competencies, broken into knowledge, skills and abilities (both personal and social).
Lumina’s intent with this grant is to create a framework that can complement the Degree Qualifications Profile the foundation has developed.
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