Integrating verified identity and credential registry platforms facilitates a transparent nationwide credential marketplace
PRESS RELEASE
Today, Merit and Credential Engine announced a strategic partnership that gives states the digital credentialing tools to build a system for standards-based reciprocity between states. These tools also help states understand the different ways in which data is adopted, distributed, and communicated across partner states, in order to inform workforce and education policy. This partnership between Merit and Credential Engine will help address issues for both public sector organizations and private citizens and ensure that transparent, verified, digital credentials lead to jobs.
Merit, a verified identity platform, works with over 1,000 public and private sector organizations, including state government agencies, to standardize and centralize digital records for professional licenses and qualifications. Now, Merit’s partners have the opportunity to seamlessly incorporate Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) that captures, links, updates, and shares up-to-date information about credentials for easy organization and searchability.
“We need to improve the professional licensing processes that the 40 million credentialed workers in the United States rely on, as well as the entire post-secondary and industry credentialing infrastructure,” said Hannah Burke, Vice President of Government Solutions at Merit. “By partnering with Credential Engine, we’re helping states take steps towards reciprocity, as well as helping people discover the full value of the credentials they’ve earned and where those skills can take them.”
Credential Engine provides a suite of technologies that support credential and competency transparency and interoperability, and operates the Credential Registry, a cloud-based library that collects, maintains, and connects information on all types of credentials, and lets individuals explore competencies, learning outcomes, up-to-date market values, and career pathways. By utilizing Credential Engine’s CTDL, a common language to describe credential information, Credential Engine and Merit enable universal credential comparability for individuals and give them autonomy to make the most of their life’s achievements.
“Nationwide reciprocity is critical, but it only achieves its purpose if the systems we rely on work properly,” said Scott Cheney, Executive Director of Credential Engine. “Integrating these technologies will help clarify a path toward new opportunities for credentialed workers and students, and improve state and nationwide processes moving forward.”
Ultimately, credential interoperability will help clear pathways for qualified individuals to identify and pursue career opportunities based on their verified skills and abilities. While digital credentialing creates many efficiencies for licensing organizations and citizens, the 50-state patchwork of requirements can create confusion and missed opportunities for both state agencies and individuals who must navigate discrepancies across state lines. By issuing merits with Credential Engine’s standard language, such discrepancies can be seamlessly overcome. This is particularly important as states build more and more reciprocity agreements, which ensure that workers with certain credentials in one state are able to transfer them to an equivalent certification in another.