Wooden letter blocks spell out 'Soft Skills', highlighting business and personal development concepts.
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Why We’re Writing About Skills, Badges, and Trust This Fall

ByAmanda Coolidge

On our blog we usually write about what goes into an open textbook: the licensing, the teaching methods, the people who write and revise a chapter together. Over the next few months, we’re asking a related question we don’t cover as often. Once someone learns something, in a classroom or somewhere else, how does anyone outside that room find out? And how do they know it’s true?

For most of the last hundred years, the answer was simple: the degree. A diploma packed years of coursework into one credential. An employer could trust it without knowing what actually happened in class—which assignments were hard, which skills stuck and which didn’t, etc. That system worked fine when jobs didn’t change much. 

Jobs are changing fast now. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39 percent of the core skills their workforce needs today to be different within five years. A degree that only gets issued once, at graduation, can’t keep up with skills that change that fast.

That’s why “skills-first” frameworks show up in government policy now, not just in hiring ads, and why it matters here (even though most of us don’t work in HR). If you build open, competency-based programs, maintain OER, or design credentials, you’re answering the same question the degree used to answer: what does this content actually teach someone to do? And how would the people who need to know find out ?

The next four posts look at that question from four perspectives: 

  • The first explains why employers are dropping degree requirements, and what’s replacing them. 
  • The second walks through the handful of skills frameworks — O*NET, ESCO, SFIA, and Lightcast—that give a skill a name everyone can check. None of them does the whole job alone. 
  • The third looks at what happens when an institution tries to force one of those frameworks onto every program it runs, and what works better than a one-size-fits-all approach. 
  • The fourth is about digital badges: why a badge is only as trustworthy as the system that checks it, and what changed with Open Badges 3.0 (the new global standard for secure, verifiable, and portable digital credentials and microcredentials). 

Later posts will go further: how good competency assessment actually gets built, and what it takes for an employer to trust a credential enough to act on it. If your work touches on how learning gets recognized outside the room it happened in, this series is for you. It starts with the degree itself—and the year one employer dropped it and applications went up 575 percent.

Lead Photo by Ann H / Pexels