Talent Marketplaces

The Trump administration wants to make all learning count as states seek to strengthen ties between education and work. Also, the feds steer $145M to pay-for-performance apprenticeship models across key industries, essays on humanizing AI’s productivity boosts and on American exceptionalism and nondegree credentials, and a new reader survey from Work Shift. (Subscribe here.)

Matching Talent With Opportunity

Americans are pursuing a broader array of education and training options as demand grows for shorter-term programs. Yet most credentials fail to adequately capture the skills and knowledge of students who earn them, keeping employers in the dark and closing doors for jobseekers without four-year degrees.

Statewide data plays are emerging as a promising fix for this increasingly urgent problem, which is drawing bipartisan interest at both the state and federal levels. For example, Arkansas last year rolled out a jobs board that doubles as a career map, a blended approach that a top state official describes as “eHarmony meets Indeed.”

To help more states take that plunge, the Trump administration last month announced a modest grant program to back the development of talent marketplaces. The U.S. Department of Education says these integrated, next-generation strategies should feature a credential registry, learning and employment records (LERs), and a skills-based job description generator.

“Talent marketplaces give learners, earners, and employers a clearer way to validate skills, opening doors to stackable credentials and stronger recognition of prior learning and work experience,” wrote Nick Moore, the acting assistant secretary for the department’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education.

Up to 10 states will divvy up the $15M prize pool, while also receiving tailored technical assistance from the feds on their talent marketplace plans. The department’s first information session for the challenge grant is scheduled for next week.

All 50 states likely will submit applications, says a state official whose purview includes a talent marketplace and credential registry. While the official welcomed the federal attention, she says the grant’s structure is overly complex, particularly for the small payout.

“It seems like a Band-Aid solution that could help the stragglers,” she says, referring to “states that haven’t really looked at this yet and are just getting started, or states that need minor upgrades.” 

Even so, the official says 10 “flashy websites” aren’t going to make statewide talent marketplaces a reality. She called for the department to focus more on policy improvements around data quality and collection on hiring, job availability, and wages.

The grant program is a really good idea, says Julia Lane, an economist and prominent data scientist who founded the Coleridge Initiative. She praised the focus on states and the use of a credential registry and LERs. Lane says she hopes the grants result in more than just one-off initiatives.

“I’d like to have seen a bit more focus on sharing results and methods across projects so that it could build an infrastructure,” says Lane, a professor at New York University.

One way to help ensure that the grants move the needle, Lane says, would be if philanthropies contribute money to force multiply the federal investments. Several foundations have focused on the LER space, and the state official predicted that the department will announce private partners for the grant program, perhaps including a firm that could help on the technical side.

Tower of Babel: A key barrier for talent marketplaces is the lack of a common language on skills. 

As it seeks to dismantle the Education Department, the Trump administration has made the Labor Department the lead agency for operating workforce education programs. That move could enable the creation of a national lingua franca of skills credentialing, Moore wrote last year, citing the work he helped lead to create the Alabama Talent Triad, one of the most advanced statewide credential registries.

“We can scale these state-level successes massively by building a cohesive national framework in which credentials—degree or nondegree—operate as bundles of verifiable competencies, stackable into flexible career pathways,” he wrote.

The nonprofit Credential Engine, in addition to tallying the 1.85M credentials available in this country, has developed an open-source data standard for describing the expanding universe of degrees, certificates, badges, and other credentials. The Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) is designed to be a common skills vocabulary, understood by both humans and machines.

The group currently works with more than 35 states and regions, says Scott Cheney, its CEO. By tapping AI-supported tools, Credential Engine is publishing a growing amount of data about providers, programs, credentials, courses, competencies, and more.

Calling out talent marketplaces and credential registries in federal grants can help with the spread of the CTDL, says Cheney, as could the inclusion of such a standard in a reauthorization of the federal government’s primary workforce system.

Cheney made that point during his testimony last month at a hearing on Capitol Hill on building a talent marketplace. He also said policymakers should incentivize employers to participate in open data standards and to issue verified, portable credentials for all skills developed on the job.

Learning and employment records can bring clarity to both sides of the labor market, said Rep. Burgess Owens, the Utah Republican who chairs the subcommittee on higher education and workforce development in the U.S. House of Representatives, which hosted the hearing.

“They give learners clear insight into the skills needed for that first job and what’s needed to continue advancement in their careers,” he said.

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers has been working to accelerate the use of LERs. Alex Kaplan, an independent expert, represented the association at the hearing. He said the question higher education faces is no longer whether LERs will shape the future of credentialing, but how they will be designed, governed, and trusted.

“For LERs to reach their potential, they must work seamlessly across different systems, platforms, and organizational boundaries,” Kaplan, who previously worked at IBM, said in his written testimony. “Without interoperability, we create a fragmented landscape of incompatible systems that defeats the entire purpose.”

Cheney agrees, and points to the role policy can play.

The Kicker: “State and federal governments need to require that all credential and skills data be made publicly available in structured, open, linked, and interoperable data formats,” Cheney says.

Reader Survey

Happy 2026! As we look forward to another busy year on the education+work beat, please take a few minutes to fill out a brief survey and share your thoughts on how Work Shift and this newsletter can improve. You can also send feedback to me directly. Please keep the tips coming!

Pay-for-Performance Apprenticeships

The Department of Labor plans to allot $145M in apprenticeship funding to a new pay-for-performance initiative, targeting key industries like AI and semiconductor infrastructure, shipbuilding, IT, and healthcare. The administration hailed it as a step toward reaching its goal of 1M new apprentices a year.

The Labor Department studied the approach in 2024 at the behest of Congress, and several states—most prominently California—have recently started using pay-for-performance models for apprenticeship. Such models typically make incentive awards when an apprentice is hired and retained for a certain time period, and again when they complete their program. It’s a common approach in European countries, which have much higher rates of apprenticeship participation than the U.S.

“We’ve always said that pay for performance is almost a precondition for growing apprenticeship in the United States,” says John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America. “This is the right path for scaling.”

The Labor Department’s announcement was a preview of the initiative, and exact details of the incentive structure are likely to be hammered out in coming months. (The department hadn’t responded to an interview request by press time.) But the department said in an announcement that it will make up to five awards as “cooperative agreements” that will run for four years. That should be a useful pilot for future pay-for-performance investments, Colborn says.

Ultimately, he says, reaching 1M apprentices will require much larger, predictable funding streams. “This doesn’t create that long time horizon that will encourage a lot more people to invest, but it’s a step in the right direction.” —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Federal Money
The Education Department awarded $169M from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), with grants focused on AI, civil discourse, accreditation reform, and short-term credentials. Several community colleges are receiving awards for capacity-building with short-term programs, including $4M for the College of DuPage in Illinois. The Postsecondary Commission ($1M) and Texas State Technical College ($915K) are among recipients for accreditation work.

Pre-Apprenticeship
The Labor Department is making available $98M to back the development of pre-apprenticeships in high-demand industries, including construction, advanced manufacturing, IT, and healthcare. The funding through the department’s YouthBuild program will help provide academic support, occupational skills training, and employment services in communities where many young people aren’t participating in the labor force.

Seeking Mechanics
Only a small sliver of auto mechanics stay on the job long enough to hit the $120K pay mark cited recently by Ford CEO Jim Farley, reports Christopher Otts for The Wall Street Journal. Ford has 5K open mechanic jobs. The company says senior master technicians average about $67K after five years, while only those at the top of the profession reach $120K. Dealership mechanics typically also must buy their own tools, some of which cost more than $800.

Infrastructure and Jobs
Research from the Brookings Institution indicates that workforce development was not a significant part of projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and infrastructure legislation, despite the fact that the laws were intended to boost good jobs along with improving infrastructure. The research by Martha Ross and Zoë Dec centered on California, where a high-level analysis found only 2% of awards included workforce development activities. A deeper look at the Los Angeles region found 7% of awards going to projects with a workforce component.

Backing Networks
Philanthropies too often fund workforce development in silos, Lynette Bell, president of the Truist Foundation, writes in Forbes. “If we want to meet this moment, we need to shift from funding isolated programs to investing in ecosystems—networks that connect employers, educators, community organizations, and tech innovators,” she writes. “We need to stop designing for idealized talent pipelines and start building for real people, in real time.”

Job Moves
Amanda Winters is the new executive director of workforce at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. After a stint at the Illinois Board of Higher Education, Winters since 2018 has worked at the National Governors Association, where she led projects focused on workforce and economic development.

Andrew Bercich has been appointed CEO of the National Association of Workforce Boards. Bercich has served on NAWB’s board and as the founder and CEO of SummitWorx Solutions. He succeeds Erica Greeley, NAWB’s acting CEO, who took the helm after Brad Turner-Little stepped down last fall.

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