Learning and Employment Records (LERs) are well positioned to revolutionize skills-based hiring and digitally transform the global talent marketplace. While the potential of LERs is compelling, most current initiatives have primarily centered on creating and securely sharing records based on recent learning and employment experiences. This work is undeniably crucial. However, to achieve widespread adoption and transformative impact, it's essential to address the gap in providing LERs for all workforce participants, while including the past education and employment experiences of over 160 million U.S. workers. We believe that for LERs to truly reshape the talent marketplace, we must recognize and incorporate everyone's past achievements.
The hypothesis to solve for this gap was simple: has artificial intelligence (AI) matured enough to translate past experiences captured in unstructured formats, into structured records conducive to an LER? While the hypothesis was simple, the growing generative AI landscape presented many unknowns. Would AI have the ability to understand the great diversity of experiences and unstructured formats that career-relevant learning and employment are often captured in, including websites, PDFs, resumes, and transcripts? Could AI extract meaningful data and produce a structured LER of sufficient value to learners and employers?
Over the past 10 months, 'Experience You', a chartered T3 Innovation Network initiative, has been met with an outpouring of support, enthusiasm, and determination from the community. We launched this initiative with the goal of fostering transformative impact, and the community demonstrated that great and exciting things are on the horizon. Reaching our Experience You goals was made possible by eight project teams, spanning 20 organizations. Each of the project teams were able to demonstrate that AI can generate LERs at scale for the current workforce and their diverse approaches have laid a strong technical, and human, foundation for future data transformation, and skills data enhancement. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Education Design Lab, and our Experience You partners are excited to explore future phases of Experience You as we seek to collaboratively create systems change for those who need it most.
Our ambitious vision — to catalyze the creation of tools that could generate up to 25 million self-asserted LERs, encompassing over 250 million machine-actionable skills — once seemed like a distant dream. Now, it's a tangible goal within our reach.
