Introduction

Welcome! You are most likely here because you are interested in connecting individuals with opportunities based on their skills and experiences. Congratulations on your important work—we are here to support you in your mission!

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This Guide is designed for teams implementing Learning and Employment Records (LERs) issued as Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to make an impact in a skills-based hiring or advancement (SBHA) system. While there are many possible uses for LERs, this Guide focuses purely on workforce use cases; this guide is less applicable to education use cases not tied to employment pathways.

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So, perhaps you are an employer seeking to leverage credentials in your talent processes, an education provider and/or issuer of credentials seeking to recognize adults’ skills, or perhaps you represent a workforce or government group seeking to put policies or services in place to ensure talent pathways are supported, or a technology vendor whose tools are used to create or transport credential data. In any case, put simply, if you are exploring how verifiable credentials can make an impact on an individual’s career trajectory, this Guide may be a valuable tool for you!

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You may be thinking, “That sounds like what I’m going for, but there is so much jargon.” Or if you are new to Learning and Employment Records, Verifiable Credentials, or skills-based hiring or advancement, we encourage you to start with this brief introductory resource: Introduction to LE Introduction to SBHA , Benefits of Verifiable Credentials

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Our team at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s T3 Innovation Network has compiled this Guide because we believe in the potential impacts LERs issued as VCs can have on economic and social mobility, and we want to support your project’s success. In collaboration with the LER community, we have identified several areas where guidance is often helpful. Each of these areas makes up a section of this guide, with corresponding action-oriented templates that you may use and adapt as you plan and implement a solution to support issuing LERs as VCs. You may find that just one of the sections is most beneficial to you at this stage, or you may find that many are valuable. Throughout the document, you will also find hyperlinked Glossary terms, technical documents, and other relevant publications, if you would like to go deeper.

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Wherever you are in your planning or implementation journey, we hope that this Guide proves helpful to you and your team. We look forward to celebrating your progress!

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