By Dr. Mike Simmons, and Michelle Mott, AACRAO Project Infuse and Innovative Credentials Learning Mobility Lab Work
As federal and state leaders accelerate efforts to build a skills-based economy, higher education is increasingly being called upon to make learning visible, portable, and actionable in the labor market. Recent policy momentum, including the growing adoption of "America's Talent Strategy: Building the Workforce for the Golden Age," signals a shift toward talent marketplace ecosystems that rely on Learning and Employment Records (LERs) to connect education and employment data more effectively.
AACRAO's Project Infuse sits at the intersection of policy and practice. As states and employers move toward skills-first hiring and greater talent mobility, Infuse is being developed as public-purpose infrastructure to help institutions translate academic learning into workforce-relevant, verifiable skills data at scale. This translation is foundational to enabling learning mobility, ensuring learning achieved in one context remains usable and recognized in the next.
1. Policy Momentum and the Rise of Talent Marketplaces
Recent federal actions signal bipartisan alignment around skills-first approaches, driving increased demand for LER development and adoption as enablers of talent and learning mobility.
A bipartisan House Subcommittee hearing held in December positioned LERs as essential workforce infrastructure rather than optional innovation.
States implementing America's Talent Strategy are tasked with building talent marketplaces capable of managing LERs effectively and supporting cross-sector mobility between education, training, and employment systems.
Regulatory action reinforces this shift. OPM's Rule of Many (effective March 9, 2026) prioritizes skills-based candidate pools in federal hiring, while NIST Digital Identity Guidelines (SP 800-63-4, finalized 2025) establish technical standards for learner-controlled digital identity and credential wallets.
Legislative momentum through pending bills like the Advancing Skills-Based Hiring Act (H.R. 4050) seek to reduce legal risk for employers and accelerate private-sector adoption of skills-first practices that support career mobility beyond traditional degree pathways.
Funding signals align with these priorities. $169 million in redirected U.S. Department of Education funding (January 2026) supports workforce-aligned credentialing, including Workforce Pell short-term credentials (8–15 weeks) starting July 1, 2026, and alternative accreditation pilots that may bypass traditional higher education structures.
States are increasingly moving to actively explore or build talent marketplaces designed to connect learners, institutions, workforce agencies, and employers. These ecosystems leverage credential registries, skills-based job description generators, and AI-driven matching tools to better align education with workforce demand. LERs are emerging as foundational infrastructure, enabling individuals to securely share verified learning and employment achievements across systems.
Despite growing policy alignment around LERs and skills-based hiring, a critical gap remains: the ability to reliably generate validated, machine-readable skills data from existing academic records. Without this capability, talent marketplaces risk falling short of their promise to support real mobility rather than isolated transactions..
2. The Hidden Workforce Challenge
As states work to operationalize these systems, several structural challenges limit their effectiveness. Millions of Americans with Some College, No Credential (SCNC) have developed substantial knowledge and skills through higher education, yet lack a recognized labor market signal. Their skills often remain invisible to employers and skills-based matching systems. While individuals may self-report skills, employers continue to express hesitancy around unverified information. Skills-based hiring depends on trusted, validated signals, often issued by institutions, that can complement or substitute for traditional degree credentials.
Institutions face significant operational constraints. Making skills transparent today typically requires manual mapping of programs, courses, and learning outcomes, a process that is time-intensive, costly, and difficult to scale, particularly for community colleges and regional institutions with limited technical capacity. The most valuable workforce data remains locked in legacy formats. Verified skills embedded in transcripts and student information systems are often inaccessible. As AI-driven workforce matching becomes more prevalent, the quality and accessibility of this underlying data will increasingly determine the effectiveness of talent marketplaces.
Together, these barriers result in underperforming systems where promising technologies exist, but incomplete or inaccessible data limits meaningful connection between individuals and opportunity.
3. A Strategic Opportunity to Unlock Talent
Transforming academic records into skills-based, machine-readable data represents a significant opportunity for learners, institutions, and states. Traditional transcripts, often shared as static PDF documents, rarely communicate what learners can actually do. Translating those records into dynamic, skills-based profiles allows learning outcomes to be understood and used by employers, workforce systems, and talent platforms across multiple stages of a learner’s journey.
This approach also supports economic mobility. By surfacing verified skills from partial or historical education, states can reconnect SCNC learners to opportunity while maximizing return on prior public investment in higher education. For employers, access to verified skills data expands the talent pool and supports more equitable, skills-first hiring practices.
4. The Role of Project Infuse
AACRAO's Project Infuse is being developed as low-cost or no-cost, public-purpose infrastructure to help institutions and states address these challenges. The infrastructure will automate the translation of academic histories into workforce-relevant, verifiable data, without requiring institutions to replace or overhaul existing IT systems. By doing so, Infuse enables learning to remain usable, portable, and trusted as learners move across education and employment systems.
Through this work, Project Infuse is designed to:
Support state participation in national talent connectivity initiatives and skills-based workforce strategies
Facilitate infusion of millions of academic records into the LER ecosystem
Unlock historical learning data to illuminate skills already present in the workforce
Convert unused or unrecognized academic credits into verified competencies for SCNC learners
Reduce technical and operational burden on resource-constrained institutions
Provide a scalable model for statewide talent marketplace implementation
Beyond institutional and workforce data exchange, Infuse aims to give individuals clearer insight into how their learning connects to career pathways and opportunities.
Why This Matters for Higher Education Leaders
Registrars and enrollment leaders play a central role in ensuring the integrity, portability, and trustworthiness of academic records. As policy momentum around LERs and skills-based hiring advances, institutions are increasingly being asked to translate learning into formats that support workforce mobility without compromising data stewardship or institutional capacity.
Project Infuse reflects AACRAO's commitment to supporting the profession by advancing infrastructure that maintains trust and data integrity while reducing technical complexity. By centralizing and automating the translation of academic records into skills-based data, Infuse enables institutions to participate meaningfully in emerging talent ecosystems and support learner mobility across a lifetime, without placing additional strain on already limited resources.
As LER infrastructure takes shape across federal and state systems, postsecondary institutions need clear implementation guidance, shared standards, and tested institutional models. The AACRAO-led LER Accelerator initiative is working alongside Project Infuse to provide these resources, helping institutions translate policy signals and technical standards into practical, campus-ready approaches for implementing LERs with integrity. By documenting what works and establishing a growing body of practice, the LER Accelerator is ensuring that LER adoption in higher education is intentional rather than reactive, coordinated rather than fragmented, and learner-centered rather than vendor-driven.