Beyond skills visibility: What makes skills visible — and trusted?

A skill has little value if no one can see it, understand it, or trust it. Credential Engine and Education Design Lab explore what it takes to turn skills into signals that can open doors to opportunity.

People gain skills everywhere: in classrooms, on the job, through military service, community roles, training programs, and lived experience.

But having a skill does not automatically make it useful in the labor market.

For a skill to help someone move toward an opportunity, other people and systems need to be able to see it, understand it, and believe it. That creates two closely related challenges for education and workforce organizations:
How do we make skills visible? And how do we make them trusted?

At Credential Engine and Education Design Lab, we approach those questions from complementary directions.

Credential Engine focuses on the technical infrastructure that allows credentials and skills to be made visible: described, connected, and used across systems.

Education Design Lab focuses on the human and quality infrastructure that helps ensure those skill claims can be trusted. They must be backed by meaningful evidence and reliable validation.

Increasingly, organizations need both.

What makes skills and credentials visible?

A credential can contain rich information about what someone learned and can do, yet still be effectively invisible outside the organization or platform that issued it.

Much of the information about credentials today lives in web pages, PDFs, transcripts, and databases that humans can read, but other systems cannot easily interpret or connect.

That is the problem credential transparency is designed to solve.

Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Description Language, or CTDL, provides a common, structured way to describe credentials, skills, assessments, organizations, pathways, and other related information. When that information is published as open, structured data through the Credential Registry, systems can find it, understand it, and connect it to other information.

That distinction is important. Visibility is not simply putting more information online. It means describing information in a way that advising tools, job-matching platforms, state systems, AI tools, and other technologies can actually use.

And that helps skills information travel across systems. Instead of information about what a credential or skill represents remaining trapped in a web page, PDF, or proprietary platform, it can be discovered, interpreted, and connected to credentials, pathways, and opportunities elsewhere.

Try it: How visible are your credentials?

Visit Credential Finder and search for your organization.

What shows up? Are your programs and credentials represented? Are the skills inside them clearly described? Can you see connections to other credentials, competencies, assessments, or pathways?

If not, you may have just identified a visibility gap.

But even when credentials and skills are clearly described and easy to find, visibility alone does not tell us what sits behind a skills claim. What evidence shows that someone has actually demonstrated the skill? And how was that evidence evaluated?

That brings us to the second challenge: What makes a skills claim trustworthy?

What makes a skills claim trustworthy?

We regularly use proxies to make judgments about people’s skills: Degrees, previous employers, job titles, years of experience, coursework completed, or even someone’s own assertion that they are “advanced” in a particular skill.

Those signals can tell us something. But they do not necessarily tell us whether someone can actually demonstrate the skill.

That is where skills validation comes in.

At the Lab, we think about validation as an evidence-based process in which someone demonstrates a skill, evidence is gathered, and that evidence is evaluated against a defined standard.

A simple way to remember it:

Evidence + Evaluation = Validation

Evidence might be a work sample, performance, simulation, portfolio artifact, assessment response, or something a person has already produced in the course of doing their job.

Evaluation is how we make sense of that evidence. Who or what reviews it? Against what rubric, competency framework, or other standard? How consistently?

A work sample alone does not validate a skill. The critical step is evaluating that evidence against an agreed-upon standard.

Try it: What would make a skill trustworthy in your context?

Pick one situation where a skill matters in your work: Hiring, promotion, credentialing, program eligibility, prior learning, or another important decision.

Then ask:

• What skill matters?
• What evidence would convince you that someone has it?
• How should that evidence be evaluated? By whom or by what technology, and against what standard?

The exercise often surfaces an important distinction: Organizations may be good at asserting skills without yet establishing what makes those assertions credible.

Visible + trusted: Why organizations need both

A skill can be trustworthy but invisible.

An organization might use a rigorous assessment and a strong evaluation process, but if the resulting information is locked inside one system, the learner or worker may not be able to carry it into the next opportunity.

The opposite can happen, too. A credential may be machine-readable, openly published, and easy for systems to find, but provide little information about whether its underlying skills were ever meaningfully demonstrated.

One creates trustworthy information that cannot travel.

The other creates information that can travel without enough reason to trust it.

Our work through the Advancing Workforce Mobility initiative has made this connection particularly clear. Across the cohort, organizations are publishing open, machine-readable credential information, creating more granular skill statements, developing employer-informed rubrics, embedding performance demonstrations into real work, and creating portable records backed by validated evidence.

In fact, half of the 10 AWM projects are working across both credential transparency or quality and skills validation. Their work reinforces a simple lesson: visibility and trust are different problems, but they are much more impactful when solved together.

Where Credential Engine + Education Design Lab come together

Organizations often encounter these challenges at the same time.

You may need to determine how your credentials and skills should be structured so they can move across systems, while also deciding what evidence makes those skills trustworthy.

You may need to connect one competency framework to another, while strengthening the assessments, rubrics, or validation practices behind the resulting signals.

That is where our work fits together.

Credential Engine can help organizations describe, connect, and publish credential and skills information as structured, open data.

Education Design Lab can help organizations define skills, identify trustworthy evidence, design or strengthen validation approaches, and build human-centered processes around how skills are demonstrated and evaluated.

Together, we can help organizations address the full challenge: not simply creating another skills signal, but creating one that people and systems can find, understand, trust, and ultimately use.

And that is the real goal. Visibility is not the finish line. Trust is not the finish line either. Both are necessary if skills are going to translate into recognition, opportunity, and mobility.

Want to go deeper?

Watch our Visible + Trusted webinar.