Throughout my career – as a teacher, school board member, university board member, and chief product officer for competency-based universities – I’ve encountered a persistent challenge: our education and workforce systems lack interoperability. They cannot effectively exchange information about what people actually know and what they can do. A student’s coursework may transfer to one institution but not another. A worker’s demonstrated skills often can’t be verified for their next opportunity. Learning that happens outside traditional institutions remains invisible.
This fragmentation isn’t just administrative inefficiency – it’s a barrier to human flourishing. In the Age of AI, we need a pragmatic ‘third way’ that transcends old debates: not top-down standardization that stifles innovation, nor fragmented chaos where credentials lack meaning, but consensus-driven infrastructure that enables both local innovation and system-wide coherence.
Skills-first standards offer this path, grounded in shared values: equity of opportunity (recognizing capability wherever developed), transparency (verifiable evidence over opaque credentials), and merit over pedigree. If human flourishing is our north star, skills-first standards are the navigation system.
Standards Make the World Work
Think about everyday infrastructure: electrical outlets work with any device, WiFi and Bluetooth connect globally, traffic signals use universal colors. This isn’t accidental, it’s the result of standards.
Standards don’t restrict diversity – they enable it. The electrical outlet doesn’t dictate which lamp you buy. Standards create infrastructure that allows innovation and variety to flourish.
The same principle can transform learning. We need standards for skills-based interoperability: frameworks for defining, measuring, and verifying what people can do. The kind that let high school courses, college programs, corporate training, and work experience all communicate about demonstrated capabilities.
The Light Socket Principle
Consider the humble light socket: developed in the late 19th century to support Edison’s screw based lightbulb design, its development was a crucial step in making electric lighting practical and widely accessible. When fluorescent, then LED bulbs arrived, we didn’t rewire buildings nor did we redesign sockets. The standard stayed stable; innovation happened on top.
Skills-first standards can work the same way. Establish frameworks for defining and crediting demonstrated skills, and you’ve created the infrastructure that enables innovation in how those skills develop and can be measured. Schools, community colleges, corporate programs, online bootcamps – all different approaches plugging into the same system of standards for recognizing verified skills. Innovation thrives though-out the ecosystem; everyone agrees on what demonstrating skills means and how they are verified.
Learning from LEED
Want proof this works? Look at LEED certification for sustainable buildings. Since its public launch in 2000, over 111,000 projects worldwide have achieved certification.¹ The buildings look nothing alike: the historic Empire State Building, Apple’s spaceship campus, a Kentucky hay shed, Shanghai’s twisting tower.
LEED doesn’t prescribe architectural styles, engineering design, nor specific materials. It sets rigorous performance standards: energy efficiency, water use, materials, air quality. Buildings achieve these in countless ways – strict about outcomes, flexible about methods. Three features make it work: tiered levels meeting organizations where they are, consensus-driven development by stakeholders, and voluntary adoption.
Skills-first standards can mirror this model: rigorous about verifying demonstrated skills, flexible about how people develop them, transparent about what mastery looks like.
Why This Matters Now: The AI Imperative
In the Age of AI, skills have shorter half-lives. Today’s programming language becomes tomorrow’s legacy code. Skills-first standards give us adaptive infrastructure: embrace new skills, revise evolving ones, retire obsolete ones without rebuilding the entire system.
A 16-year-old sees pathways from learning to careers. A 35-year-old reskills with portable proof. A 55-year-old demonstrates decades of expertise. Learners own portable records, navigate multiple routes to demonstrating competence, and build modular capabilities across a lifetime.
It Works: Evidence from the Field
Does this actually work? Western Governors University offers compelling evidence. WGU has awarded over 352,000 degrees with 22% annual growth.² The model works because it measures mastery rather than seat time – directly addressing the limitation of the traditional credit hour standard, which measures time (one hour of classroom instruction plus two hours of out-of-class work per week) but reveals little about demonstrated competencies.³ What matters: 95% of employers rate WGU graduates’ critical thinking and collaboration as equal to or better than traditional graduates.⁴
In my work developing competency-based universities, I saw this transformation. We created frameworks showing learners met rigorous, industry-informed standards rather than accumulating credit hours. Students who could demonstrate mastery graduated faster and better prepared. When the system recognized learning wherever it occurred, economic mobility became tangible.
With a K-12 lens, the “Industry-Backward” mapping approach demonstrates this same efficacy. Through California’s K12 Strong Workforce Program, curriculum is designed in reverse: starting with skill gaps defined by regional Industry Advisory Councils rather than academic tradition. In San Mateo County, this vertical alignment has tangibly shifted the classroom to match labor market demand. When local employers signaled a critical need for “Big Data” literacy, high schools evolved their math pathways, augmenting traditional Algebra 2 with applied data science. Similarly, after the biotech sector identified a gap in bio-informatics, the curriculum expanded to include software analysis alongside core biology. This approach maintains academic fundamentals while ensuring students graduate with the specific, verified competencies the modern economy demands.
Building the Infrastructure Together
Without shared frameworks developed collaboratively across sectors, progress stalls. This requires all stakeholders at the table: educators, employers, workforce planners, technology providers, policymakers, and learners.
The Skills Professionals Association exemplifies this approach. SPA is developing Skills-First Certification – a voluntary framework modeled on LEED that evaluates organizations across hiring, development, mobility, and outcomes.⁵ Standards emerge through consensus among diverse stakeholders, not mandate. Organizations achieve tiered certification (Silver, Gold, Platinum) with public disclosure creating accountability.
These standards aren’t prescriptive about what skills matter or how to develop them – they establish processes for defining, validating, and crediting skills. A community college, corporate program, and workforce agency can use different pedagogies while sharing common language for demonstrated skills.
This is how systemic transformation happens: through network effects, not mandates. When enough organizations adopt skills-first standards, credentials become portable, labor markets become efficient, learners gain mobility. Isolated innovations connect into a coherent ecosystem enabling human flourishing at scale.
A Call to Action
Funders: invest in collaborative infrastructure – multi-stakeholder initiatives developing taxonomies, protocols, and certification frameworks. Not single-institution grants, but investments in connective tissue.
Practitioners and policymakers: engage across boundaries. Participate in consensus-driven standards with colleagues from education, workforce, and industry. Experiment. Create procurement rewarding verified capabilities. Push for interoperability.
The destination? Teenagers see pathways from interests to opportunities. Mid-career professionals pivoting without starting over. Lifetimes of learning recognized wherever they happened. Humans flourish because we developed a collaborative infrastructure that adapts with them.
The socket is ready. Now we need to build the light bulbs – together.
References
1 U.S. Green Building Council. (2024). LEED project directory. As of June 2024, 111,397 LEED certified projects worldwide. https://www.usgbc.org/projects
2 Western Governors University. (2023). Annual Report. WGU had awarded 352,368 degrees as of December 2023, representing a five-year compound annual growth rate of 22%.
3 Lumina Foundation. (n.d.). The Carnegie Unit: A century-old standard in a changing education landscape. https://www.luminafoundation.org/files/resources/carnegie-unit-report.pdf
4 Harris Poll. (2024). Employers Study 2024. Survey found that 95% of employers rated the soft skills of WGU graduates as equal to or better than those from other institutions.
5 California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. (2024). K12 Strong Workforce Program Framework. State mandate requiring Local Education Agencies to align curriculum with regional labor market data from Industry Advisory Councils; in San Mateo County, this specifically funds the “Bio-informatics” and “Data Science” pathways referenced.
https://www.cccco.edu/About-Us/Chancellors-Office/Divisions/Workforce-and-Economic-Development/K12-Strong-Workforce
6 Bay Area Community College Consortium. (2024). Strong Workforce Regional Plan. Identifies “Biotechnology” and “Data Analytics” as priority sectors for San Mateo County, directing funding to high schools that adopt industry-backward curriculum. https://baccc.net/
7 Skills Professionals Association. (2024). Skills-First Certification: Building a new standard for workforce excellence. https://www.skillprofessionals.org