Education Design Lab provides an overview of emerging practices + tools in this 2025 Skills Validation Market Scan.
Employers and opportunity seekers are excited about the possibilities of a skills-based ecosystem, but this new process for codifying a person’s experiences and abilities into skills requires one significant, and missing, piece: Trust. Employers need to trust that the credentials they receive from opportunity seekers are valid representations of their skills. Jobseekers need to trust that their digital credentials are safe, accurate, and will lead to employment and advancement.
Our hypothesis
We posit that the trust needed for the validation of skills to be brought into a meaningful reality is established through a network of skills validation methods and opportunities. We also recognize that the routes through which an individual can demonstrate skills are as varied as the individuals themselves. Therefore, in order to equitably create a skills-based employment ecosystem, the routes by which skills are validated must be held together with common standards and language, but flexible enough to accommodate a multitude of validation practices.
About this report
Education Design Lab conducted this market scan to identify both:
+ Current practices and tools: What employers and opportunity seekers are currently doing
+ Emerging practices and tools: Areas of innovation which have potential to help address skills validation challenges experienced by employers and opportunity seekers alike.
In this report, we define skills validation, discuss why it matters, and then dive deep into seven methods, 15 practices, and a myriad of tools. We showcase early examples of how AI may contribute to each method of validation and challenges that stakeholders may have to mitigate when using each approach. In several categories, we also present an overview of “next-gen tools.” These sections provide an overview of prototype tools developed by Education Design Lab, with partners and our Skills Validation Network, between 2022-2024.
While we spend time discussing these particular skills validation methods and tools, the purpose of this work is to provide a broad look at what exists, and more importantly, what is possible. We do not aim to promote one method or tool over another; rather, we seek to advocate for a validation ecosystem in which all of these tools and methods are used, applied in the most relevant contexts, working seamlessly together to provide a fuller and more accurate picture of what opportunity seekers know and can do.
