Brought, Sought, and Taught: Toward a System of Skill-Driven Applications

INTRODUCTION

Continuously building connections between academic curricula and the skills employers need is an imperative for institutions of higher education (IHEs). An overwhelming percentage of workers consider continuous skills development as either important or essential to future career success (Rainie, 2018), and many believe high demand skills correlate to higher paying jobs (Clayton & Torpoe-Sabey, 2021). For those areas of IHEs that primarily serve working adults and historically underrepresented and underserved populations, this imperative is especially urgent. Providing learners with appropriate opportunities to develop and apply skills is not just a trend, it is fundamental to creating a more inclusive prosperity.

As IHEs strive to accomplish this mission, a good starting point is to explicitly associate learning content and activities with the skill(s) they address, a process we will follow Lightcast (2021) and refer to as “skillification.” Once identified, the skills from a curriculum can be used as a connector to other things that have been similarly tagged (Lee, 2005; Sodhi & Son, 2010; Zhang & Zhang, 2012). In one such example, Western Governors University and Central New Mexico Community College defined skills taught in courses which were then were mapped to skills identified by the National Institute of Cybersecurity as meaningful for cybersecurity professionals. As students completed courses, the associated skills they had gained were stored in a Learning Credential Network blockchain created by IBM and used in career counseling as they explored their job potential (America Workforce Policy Advisory Board Digital Infrastructure Working Group, 2020).

What is most intriguing about applications like the one from IBM is that skills appear to be a unit of information that can be extracted from a number of experiences and can power a broad range of solutions. In addition to helping students find jobs relevant to their education, matching skills between jobs and courses can help IHEs keep curriculum current with market needs or guide course recommendations relevant to a student’s job goals. Clear articulation of which skills are taught at which points in a course can be used to dissect courses into smaller units that can be stacked differently for different learner populations as context warrants. Identifying skills can facilitate a model for thinking about how to value real-world experience in lieu of classroom learning, which is useful in awarding prior learning credit. It also offers an easy way to connect the curriculum of one IHE to another to support credit transfer in a more streamlined and consistent manner.

Despite the great potential, however, it is not yet clear that there is widespread use of skill identification for the sorts of applications we have just imagined. Defining and mapping skills in a curriculum can be daunting for an IHE. The level of intentionality that identifying the relationships between skills and coursework calls for is far greater and significantly more time consuming than typical curriculum development approaches (Joyner, 2016; Wang, 2015). Skill identification by faculty is often painstaking and, even worse, occasionally inconsistent (Britton, et al., 2008). Once mapping has occurred, documentation of that work generally lives in disconnected spreadsheets which can be cumbersome to access. Limited access makes it difficult for faculty and students to use skills information on a regular basis. It also makes it less likely that information will be updated regularly, a problem which can be especially damaging in disciplines where knowledge and needed skills are constantly evolving (D'Orio, 2019).