Holly Zanville: Mapping the Skills-Based Learning Ecosystem

Work Forces

Holly Zanville, research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and founder of the Learn and Work Ecosystem Library, discusses her approach to organizing information about the rapidly evolving skills-based learning landscape. Drawing from her extensive background across education, state systems, and philanthropy, Zanville explains how she created a specialized digital hub that curates resources about key ecosystem components. She explores the growing tension between degree-centric and skills-based approaches in higher education, highlighting how institutions are navigating the "both-and" reality of offering traditional degrees alongside competency-based programs. Zanville shares insights from her collaboration with the Society for Human Resource Management's new Center for Skills First Future, which aims to transform hiring practices for 100,000 employers over the next decade. The conversation examines how employers across five leading industry sectors are implementing skills-based hiring practices, while addressing the critical need for better information sharing and standardized language across the fragmented learn-and-work ecosystem. Zanville emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community engagement in building resources that serve learners, educators, employers, and policymakers navigating this complex landscape.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: Kaitlin feels like every day the way we help people advance their learning and careers becomes more and more complex.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Indeed it does, Julian. From employers rethinking hiring practices with skills based approaches to educators, redesigning learning models with AI and experiential learning, our podcast guests have highlighted many new models and cutting edge innovations, and we see these efforts impacting our consulting projects as well.

Julian Alssid: Absolutely, and keeping track of this dynamic and ever changing environment is no small feat. It requires a deep understanding of what's working, what's not, and how all these interconnected pieces fit together.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today. We're so excited to be speaking with a leader who is doing just that, making sense of this intricate and ever changing ecosystem.

Julian Alssid: We are thrilled to be joined by Holly Zanville. Holly is a research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy and codirector of the Program on Skills, Credentials and Workforce Policy. She's also the founder and lead of the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library. Previously, Holly co-led the national initiative Credential As You Go and served as a strategy director at Lumina Foundation. Her background includes leadership positions at state higher education systems and boards in Oregon, Washington, and WICHE, as well as academic roles at community colleges and non-traditional university programs.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So without further ado, Holly, welcome to Work Forces. We're looking forward to learning more about your work.

Holly Zanville: I am so glad to be joining you today.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you for being with us. So as we get going, Holly, can you please tell us? I mean, Julian talked a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear more from you about your background and what led you to founding the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library.

Holly Zanville: Great. So as you already heard, my background is pretty wide ranging. I've worked in K 12, community colleges, universities, non traditional programs, coordinating boards and systems in states and in philanthropy, as the strategy director at Lumina Foundation and all those jobs really, I realized recently carry one thread, and that kind of reminds me of what I've always really cared about, and that is my long-standing interest in both information, the quality information and systems, believing that if we're going to make improvements in all of our systems, in education and workforce, we're going to have to seed these relationships and work in collaboratives. And so a lot of my work over the years has really focused on acting like a system and making improvements in systems and sharing information and collaborating. So that's a little bit of my background and what brings me, I think, to really the topic of the Learner and Work Ecosystem Library. And, you know the why. Where did this idea even come from for a library? And actually, it started with my work at Lumina Foundation, when several of the national foundations were starting to pay attention to changes in credentialing that were going on, and especially noting that 40 million some Americans who come under that title that we don't like called some college and no credential. So they had some background in college work, but they never received any credential. And we were really increasingly concerned about what we could do to help with these kinds of issues. So at that time, and this was about 2017, 2018 about 40 of the foundations, mostly national foundations actually came to a meeting to compare notes. How could we really better learn about what investments we were all making on these issues of importance, particularly around micro credentialing, was just coming to the fore around that time so that we could maybe leverage our monies to make them go farther, because we could all see what was coming in the tea leaves. So the outcome of that meeting was actually a call to action, and folks were saying, well, could we develop a map? Could we try to map out the key initiatives, the big footprint initiatives that were being funded mostly by the foundations at that time to improve our information about them, and once we maybe could get the map, maybe we could collaborate more effectively as a group of foundations. So being a person who likes system work and challenging work and mapping, et cetera, I raised my hand to work on this. And so a small number of us from a few of the foundations actually designed what a map of key initiatives might look like, and we put on the map who was working on initiatives, because who's doing the work is really important for us to know. And then we classified them into some key categories. There were actually, over a period of years, three versions of the map, and I think this speaks to how quickly changes were going on in the innovation space of the nation, and Lumina posted it at its website. There's still remnants of it at the website. And one of the things we could all see was that there were important philanthropic investments in all these areas. They were growing, because we could see the number of actual things on the map growing every year, and that there were many collaborations that were going on we were picking up among states, employers, higher ed institutions. And that one really interesting thing to us was that managing a lot of these big scale initiatives were coming from intermediaries, the third party groups that we all know that play such an important role in helping, particularly with collaborations. So this was a really interesting area I became extremely interested in, and my read of the system that we were all looking at the map was that it was going to keep growing in importance and confusion and be marked by lack of information. And so I really wanted to expand the mapping effort then so we could take this a little further. That really was not a priority of the foundation at that time. They wanted more direct funding of the innovative initiatives. And so that was when I left philanthropy to go, after 15 years, to become a research professor at George Washington University. And I kind of took it on as a personal mission to here's my I'm going to bring in FedEx as an example. So I decided it would be good to come up with a bitter airplane that could deliver needed information. And it would, but it would be a specialty airplane. It'd be like a FedEx airport with special airplanes that we'd be carrying specialized information about the learn and work ecosystem. So I started, I reached out to lots of experts around the US. I think many of them have probably been on your podcast, and we designed the special collection and called it a library, the learn and work ecosystem library. It's really a hub. It's like an airport, as it were, where we collect, we curate, we coordinate digital content about key components of the ecosystem. We think there are maybe 12 of them. And if you go to our library, you'll see what the 12 are. There are key topic reports for more in depth coverage of what some of the leading topics are going on in the ecosystem. We included those initiatives and special projects that are working to improve the ecosystem, like we did on the original map, that mostly are, I think 80% of them are probably funded by foundations. So the foundations are playing a big role, and have been in, in fueling the innovation agenda, I think, for the US. We also identified the organizations doing the work and several other features. So we opened for business our little airport in late 2022. We've been growing really quickly. Now we're using AI to help users who come to us to find information using more natural language queries, and we've been adding just two features, and then I'll stop. I'll stop here. We've entered into partnerships with other organizations. If it was FedEx, we found that people have a lot of baggage, and they need to have a place to put their information, and they don't really put it. It's easier for them to put it at a place like the library, where we can host it, and then all their members and other groups can come and see that information there, rather than putting it in a siloed website among all these different collaborators, and furthermore, we're working with a lot of organizations to test the usability of the other library. Does this really meet information needs? Because we're so early, we need to keep testing the waters about that. So we've grown from a few 100 artifacts at launch to over 1500 now we have a glossary of nearly 600 terms that are used throughout the learn and work ecosystem, and we've made that available free to organizations that want to put the glossary at their website, so that as visitors come to their website but they don't know what some of these terms mean, like, what does a micro credential mean, or what is badging and what's up skilling and re skilling, what are skills versus skills based hiring, we have all that captured, and they can put our our glossary, if they like, there and or folks can just be advised to come to our library where we have terms.

Julian Alssid: Given your work now at the intersection, or should I say, the learning and learning and work airport, perhaps we'd like to talk first about the education side of the equation. And we know that one of the themes that has been taking on greater and greater prominence, and we've talked a lot about it on our podcast, is a focus on skills and competencies. And so we're interested to hear your take on how educational organizations and institutions are shifting their efforts to focus more on skills and competencies. And if you could give us an example or two that we should follow.

Holly Zanville: So the library and or the airport where education is takes up a lot of space at the airport, as it should, because the preparation of folks for jobs is a very large effort that we all care so much about and is so important to our economy. So but, but to go back to something we've been witnessing for several years now, this growing dilemma for higher education, the big question, should we remain degree centric and continue our literally 200 plus your focus on college degrees as maybe the best preparation for good jobs in the US, or move to shorter term credentials of value. And I'm purposely portraying this dilemma as an either or, but we know that there's growing recognition that the answer really has to be both and. So the and the reason is that higher ed has to be closely aligned to workforce demands by both employer demands and student demands, and there are significant needs and some different needs by industry sectors. So we can't have the same answer for everybody. So degrees and licenses are essential for professional jobs in medicine, nursing, law, architecture, engineering, and a much longer list than that, but there are a growing number of other types of credentials, shorter term credentials, like certificates, badges, micro credentials, energy certifications, that they do have value in many areas of the workforce, and they're often used in which is a good thing, I think, a combination with traditional degrees like associate degrees, baccalaureate and The various graduate level degrees and the impacts of AI are changing and coming on strong, because it's really impacting job getting and job keeping in major ways. So we don't think higher ed, I don't think anyone thinks higher ed can throw away the traditional degrees they offer, but I think there's growing agreement that higher ed needs to update their offerings and expand their offerings to meet changing workforce demands through shorter term credential options. So within this dilemma, along comes the competency based education push for the last, oh, I don't know, more than a decade. And then comes the skills agenda, coming on really strong, with employers who are asking candidates for jobs, but they're also asking their own employees, do you have the right skills for the jobs we have open, show us what you know and can do. And the emphasis is really increasingly on can do. So how are we going to know when somebody has the right competence skills? And I would say that higher ed tends to use the word competencies more to define the learning outcomes that occur in higher ed programs. And employers tend to use the skills word more, but they're coming together, and those words are graying, and now everyone is using the terms back and forth across those fences. If there are actual fence lines between higher ed and important, some of us think there are, but they're coming down, and movement is rapidly approaching. So to answer your question directly about competency based, many of the higher institutions have been shifting their focus toward competencies and actually skills to better align with workforce needs. And we're noting, which we think is really interesting, that educational institutions are adopting frameworks to do this, all kinds of credentialing systems and partnerships to understand what should the new array of credentials be? And we're seeing institutions that are doing both. They're doing both, and they have a portion of their programs that are competency based, are mostly competency based, but there are other programs at their institutions that are not so what's interesting is to have both curricular models on the same campus. But there are also some institutions, but the research data shows that there's relatively few, maybe only about 15 institutions that either are entirely or mostly comps based education. So even though the conversation is rich around competency-based education, the actual number of institutions that have really gone to the major full shift, pretty few, except we know that the ones that have made the shift are very well known. And I'm just, I have a short list of them here. You know Western Governors University Capella, University of Wisconsin Extended Campus, their flexible option, Walden, Charter, Oak College, Purdue Global. And then there's some that are mostly competency based, but not entirely: Southern New Hampshire, Texas, A & M University has several Northern Arizona University, Thomas Edison and Central New Mexico Community College, Austin Community College. I won't go through the whole list, but the point is that we're in the middle of a shift. Some people have already put the landing gear down on their plane, and I think they're saying, well, we've done the areas of programs that really are competency based, like, like nursing that is, or cybersecurity that are led by national organizations that are very strong on here are the competencies in this profession. But there are other ones, particularly the liberal arts, that are not being led as much to being set up as competency based programs. So the institutes have to make their piece, and we all have to put together a system which has a little bit of a lot of things, and this is creating, I think, a lack of information about who's got what and why is this important? So once you accept the fact that differences are good and there's a good reason why we have these differences, then you move to this question of, are we creating a system that is really confusing for employers to understand, for students to understand, for policymakers to understand, for faculty. Yes, we are. We're sorry. We're all sorry about that. But in fact, it's a more difficult learn and work ecosystem now than we've had in the past. And there are some organizations that are making it a little clearer, and on the competency based side, especially, Julian, you asked for an example. I think one of the best ones is the Competency-Based Education Network, or C-BEN. They've really been growing rapidly, working with institutions that really want to understand how to do compass based education and why to do it, and what happens on a campus where you've got both-ands, how are they, how they are navigating the choppy waters. So I would say that through the kinds of workshops, webinars, training opportunities, C-BEN provides, they're a really good example on the higher ed side for competency based education. And I've already named some of the institutions that are really on that side. So I think I'll stop there, because I think that's a lot of the background, least that I think about when I, when I think about the competency based side of things with higher risk.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well and and I think what you've just talked us through there Holly shows right exactly the complexity that we're facing here, and that with this confusion, the need for a library is more and more essential. I just had one quick follow up regarding the library. Who is the primary target audience for the library? Is it professionals in the field? Is it learners themselves? Could it be both?

Holly Zanville: It's all, and in fact, when we have a slide, when we do slide presentations, it has 26 stakeholder groups, and when you go to the library, you can do a search by your stakeholder group, so you could be primarily a policymaker interested in content. You could be a credential provider interested in content. You could be an employer and workforce. You could be a workforce board. You could be more aligned with the data structures around that side of the shop. You could be more of a journalist trying to understand, where do I go to get information and examples for stories. So and students we're really hoping are using the library, particularly students that might want to get a job someday working in this with the think tanks, with the research and policy think tanks, the intermediaries that I talked about where, if you're in graduate school now, and you might be in education or political science or economics, you'll get some of this information, but you are not. I just would bet no one's going to be talking about the Learn & Work Ecosystem, and you're not going to be learning about the full array on the learning and the workforce side, and how it comes together and why we need to redesign so we think that the library is a place where students up and coming, and young professionals, young in their career, professionals and professionals who are at the foundations, professionals who are in these think tanks, could learn a lot about who's doing this work. I only know about some projects. I don't know about not that we capture all of them, but our aim was to capture all of them, and so we love to think that there's a huge number of different kinds of stakeholders that could benefit by better information about the very systems that we all have to live and work in

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. Well, and as you acknowledged earlier, right, like, is there this? I think you called it a line or a silo, right, between all these entities, but ultimately, having an ecosystem library that says, You know what, no matter who you are in this work, just as the type of information that's out there is, is essential. I think it has been essential for some time, but I feel like more so than ever now. The need is not going away.

Holly Zanville: A standard language, if you if, if in your state, your legislature says we're going to call these things micro credentials, but in another state, we're calling these digital badges, and the third state is going to call them certificates. That's fine. No one's going to make anybody come to one standard word, but we do need translators, and we need to understand the range of terms that are being used, roughly what they mean who's using them, so that we can talk among ourselves and trigger information well. So that's been another important aim of the library.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So if we, if we can shift for a moment to the employer side, not to say there's like you said, not to say there's sides here. But if we're looking at this from different vantage points, what, what are you seeing from the employer perspective on skills? I know you mentioned skills based hiring. But you know what and what prospective employees no one can do. What are you seeing in that space?

Holly Zanville: Well, on the employer side, and they often have their own language that we all need to understand. That skill based hiring plane has left the airport to continue that metaphor, and it's really gaining speed. So the skills agenda, it's a movement. It's a driver of change. It's reshaping how employers are evaluating talent and how individuals are preparing for job, and also how they're keeping their jobs and moving through their careers. And so I'll just mention four things that we're seeing on the ground that are really impacting employers in this space. So employers are clearly more focused on identifying individuals who can succeed in their job roles, regardless of how or where they gain their skills. And this practice, the good thing is, it can open doors to job seekers who may have been overlooked by traditional degree hiring practices. They may be in that 40 million who have some college with no credential, but they may have acquired skills through experience and through their college programs, etc, where they should have those doors open to them and employers will look at them for potential positions they have. We know that employers are using a range of tools now, like skills assessments, training programs, job simulations to evaluate the competencies that applicants say that they have on their college transcripts and in their portfolios, probably on their job applications. Because employers are not just going to accept what people say they're, you know, they're going to test them. And there's a lot of tools, increasingly, out there to see whether or not you have the skills that you indicate that you have. And then the other, the fourth one, which I think is really important for all of us to recognize, is that this is not just for the young adults coming out of, let's say educational programs or their first job, or two, employers are really promoting a lifelong learning approach, where their employees are going to be gaining new skills through industry certifications and on the job experience. And so it's like everyone is like redrawn and redrawing that line to follow through to whatever age you're putting it on. And then there's a group that's working on trying to talk about a 100 year economy versus, say, where you're going to work for 40 years. And my own view is you're probably going to be working for closer to 60 years, if you're lucky, and have good health and so that we we, but we don't provide a lot of good assistance and information to older adults who are going to stay in, in in jobs and maybe even transitioning among jobs. So there's this tremendous flux going on, and this is partly in the skills agenda. So I want to touch on a research, or body of research that I find really interesting, that comes out annually from Mercer, and they call it the Skills Snapshot Survey report. And the most recent survey that they originally just put out finds that the adoption of skills based talent practices is accelerating and organizations around the world. This is not just in the US, but worldwide, are embedding skills from hiring, including career development, to compensation promotion. So this is a pretty pervasive movement. It's not just about the original job getting there, this is not happening equally as we would expect among all industry sectors. So there's some really interesting data from Burning Glass and from McKinsey that have spotted five industry sectors that they say are leading the way in skills based practices. So this won't probably be a surprise to most folks, but the first on the list is information technology and software. The second on the list is healthcare, with evolving roles in telehealth, informatics, patient care health systems, all expanding their use of credentials to validate skills. The third one is in advanced manufacturing, where many of those employers in precision machining, robotics and automation, they're using industry certifications and competency based training to address their workforce shortages. A fourth on the list is finance and insurance, where increasing demand for digital literacy and analytical skills that are not actually taught at least until recently in traditional business degrees, is happening. And so the skills agenda is really important in finance and insurance. And the fifth one on the list is retail and hospitality, and especially for frontline roles, employers are using skills assessments and micro credentials to identify talent and support career advancement. So it's pretty interesting that, you know, some folks have gone first. We can learn from them, but we need information to come back to the airport thing. If we can get information and make it available, maybe people in retail and healthcare, they'll know about it, but others maybe will not understand all of this. And so that's the role the libraries to try to be a watchtower place to look out, try to pull information in and code it and put it in some insofar as to help people really understand this kind of changing movement around the skills movement.

Julian Alssid: So on that employer side, we understand that you're the library is working with the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM on their new Center for a Skills First Future. Can you speak a little bit to the fact that SHRM is now stepping into the middle of this pretty big deal. Can you tell us a little bit about your collaboration with SHRM?

Holly Zanville: Sure, and we're really excited about this, because this really makes it clear that employers are such an important driver of a lot of the reforms that are going on in our economy, affecting all of us. So they've, as you've just noted, the SHRM Foundation, with SHRM, has announced that it would launch this new Center for Skills First Futures, and they launched it literally just on June 2. So this is just, you know, a week and a half ago. And the purpose of the center is to modernize traditional hiring and the advancement systems that are tied within workforce over literally the next decade, and are sort of seeing this as it's going to take maybe 10 years to get significant work done, and they've got a large goal. They want to transform hiring and advancement practice for as many as 100,000 employers and 500,000 human resource professionals, managers and executives, who are very involved, of course, in hiring and setting the policies among employers and how did they come to this? Well, it came out of research that they had done that found that many companies were already turning to skills first strategies because they needed to, because of their talent needs. They were having shortages, etc. 90% of the employers that they were studying acknowledged the benefits of skills first hiring, but only 15% of them indicated they had actively implemented skills first hiring, and they weren't sure how to do it. They really needed help. So this data was really, I has really been driving the SHRM center, and I'll touch on the four pillars of the work at the center of which our library is really closely involved with one of them. So the first pillar, which is really interesting, is to evaluate an organization, a company's progress in adopting a skills first approach. And they have an interactive tool that's available now in their new center that they're calling it a Skills Action Plan. And that tool can assess where an employer is at in its development. You might be at the beginning level. You might be an intermediate. You might be advanced in using skills based hiring. Well, once they know which level you may be at, then SHRM plans to help to guide the company's learning through a training offering and this unique library of resources. So the second pillar is the resource library, and that's where our library has been so involved in this effort, because they built their library to provide research tools, employer examples, and glossary terms, etc, for those who are going to be implementing skills, first strategies across the whole employee's life cycle. And the cool thing for us is that the library, and I think for them too, is that it's being powered by the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library's tech architecture. So they provide their content to us, and then we enter into our database, and then they pull out information using the kind of special coding and stuff that we've been able to put on it to feed their library. And we're really excited that the library can play this role, and we're gonna, you know, we'll be learning a lot on both sides about how to do this. How does a library beget another library? So the third pillar is to go back to that training, one that I mentioned, once they know where you're at as a company, and they're offering a skills-first credential, and they're offering a training regimen opportunity. I think it's going to end in a certificate to train HR folks in skills based workforce strategies, depending on where they start. And that's why that first assessment, that tool to assess where you're at, is so important. And then the fourth pillar in their new center is a vendor database, and basically they're putting a lot of information about sourcing and assessment for upskilling and mobility, etc, for folks that want to have data around what they're doing. So we're just one of a group of partners that SHRM is working with to bring this major resource forward. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot about this in our literature going forward, as I think we're all going to be impacted by what SHRM is doing with their new center.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, that sounds very exciting, and as Julian said, I feel like it shows where the employer space is headed, right like this is a major milestone moment in that work. So thank you for sharing a bit about that and the way that the library is supporting that effort. So Holly, drawing from your past experiences, we always ask a question on our Work Forces podcast about becoming forces, or our audience is interested in how to become forces. So in this case, we're wondering, what practical steps can our podcast audience take to become forces in both using and sharing valuable resources to navigate the skills based future.

Holly Zanville: I love this question because when we built the library, we kind of wanted to build it as a Wiki model or a community engagement model, so we kind of feel like the community, all, all the folks we're talking about, should sort of own this library. So this is not Holly's library, even though I'm passionate about it, because to have the library be useful, everybody has to provide content. We hope that folks will visit the library and find resources that are useful, if not, tell us if, if, if, if visitors, people on this podcast, have information that they know of initiatives or glossary terms that they would like to see there, let us know. We'll put them in the library and they become part of the community engagement model, to become part of the Wiki model. So we're hoping that folks will really engage with the library, help make it better and use it and let us know if that airport is working, and are the flights? Are the flights coming out on time? And are they accurate? And are they all working so and if folks really want to follow us closely at the library, there's easy ways they even sign up for our e news, where they can even follow along some of the new features. I didn't cover all of them today, but you can follow along with what we are doing, and you can see our latest, greatest information. We're on LinkedIn, so we hope people will read some of our social media and follow us there. So we're excited that we're all in this together. And we, you know, going back to the very beginning of the podcast, we think collaboration is going to be the name of the game and sharing information, and we just have to figure out a way at sharing good information. So we want to have curated good information that helps advise us as we try to navigate what truly is and probably will continue to be for a while, a pretty messy, confusing ecosystem that we're all sharing.

Julian Alssid: So Holly, then I guess that means that anyone who is confused, doesn't know where to go, we're going to send them straight to the library.

Holly Zanville: That would be good.

Julian Alssid: No, no, it's great. It's a great resource. You've offered so much really excellent information about the state of play. And you know this is, this is definitely ongoing and unfolding before our eyes. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today, and you know we will continue to follow your work as well.

Holly Zanville: Come join us at the airport.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We will, we will. Thank you so much. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces, we hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces dot info or on Apple, Amazon and Spotify. Please Subscribe, Like and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.