New report by Education Design Lab explores what it takes to build skills-validation ecosystems that work for people — and at scale.
As employers, educators, and workforce systems move toward skills-based practices, the challenge is no longer simply issuing badges or building assessments. The real work is creating systems that help people demonstrate what they can do, earn credentials they understand and trust, and carry those signals into real opportunities.
Education Design Lab’s new report, Validating Skills at Scale: A Human + Tech Ecosystem View, explores what it takes to make that possible.
Using the Lab’s XCredit ecosystem as a reference model, the report follows a composite opportunity seeker through the full skills-validation journey: discovering an opportunity, selecting a skill, completing a performance-based assessment, receiving feedback, earning and sharing a credential, and navigating next steps.
The report’s central finding is clear: Skills validation works only when human experience and technical infrastructure are designed together.
For learners, that means clear information, trusted guidance, relevant assessments, accessible technology, feedback that supports growth, and a visible connection between validation and opportunity. For systems, it means secure identity management, interoperable data, machine-readable credential metadata, reliable integrations, transparent mastery rules, and pathways that allow skills and credentials to travel across platforms.
Neither layer can succeed alone. Systems built only around standards, automation, and interoperability can lose learners when experiences feel confusing, irrelevant, or disconnected from real value. But systems that focus only on user experience struggle to scale without the data architecture and technical reliability needed to make credentials portable, verifiable, and trusted.
The report identifies several priorities for the field:
- Build trust through clarity, transparency, and visible outcomes.
- Connect skills validation to real opportunity, advancement, and next steps.
- Design recovery pathways that treat an unsuccessful assessment attempt as a learning opportunity — not an exit point.
- Use open standards and interoperable infrastructure to support portability, verification, and scale.
- Treat skills validation as a connected ecosystem, not a standalone assessment, badge, or platform.
Grounded in more than three years of XCredit pilots with over 10 partner organizations across workforce agencies, employers, training providers, and higher education institutions, the report offers a practical system-level view for credentialing platforms, assessment providers, colleges, workforce intermediaries, employers, policymakers, and funders.
Download the full report to explore the human and technical conditions that can make skills validation more meaningful for learners, more useful to employers, and more durable as infrastructure for economic mobility.
The report was written by Nishita Chheda and Mary Gwozdz. The research included in this report is made possible through the generous support of Walmart.
