Your Skills Strategy Has a Data Problem: Building Infrastructure for Skills Mobility

Higher education is investing in microcredentials, competency-based education, apprenticeships, learning and employment records (LERs), and skills-based pathways. But capturing skills is only the beginning. The harder challenge is getting trusted skills and evidence out of the systems where they originate and into the places where learners, institutions, and employers can actually use them. Today, that often requires custom integrations, manual mapping, one-off transformations, and significant technical expertise. And simply moving data is not enough. Different systems describe the same learning differently, while evidence, context, and meaning can be lost in translation.

This session explores what it would take to treat skills mobility as an infrastructure problem rather than another application implementation. Using lessons from an emerging open-source Skills Mobility Infrastructure proof of concept, presenters will examine a reusable approach for triggering, translating, validating, and routing skills information across existing systems. We will also explore where AI can reduce manual interpretation and mapping, where deterministic approaches remain essential, and why trust and human validation must be designed into the architecture. Attendees will leave with practical questions to evaluate whether their institution’s current technology ecosystem is ready to support skills mobility at scale.