Billion Dollar EdTech Idea 2: A portable ‘skills passport’ for ‘squiggly’ careers
A career two decades ago looked very different. You could get by with just a few skills (patience being the most important) as you waited for your turn to get promoted. Not so going forward.
In her book ‘Flux’, April Rinne notes how we have come to live in a world where many people will not be motivated in climbing a career ladder that someone else has built. Today, more than ever, professionals have so many more ways to earn income and create a meaningful career.
Authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis call these non-linear paths as ‘squiggly careers’: dynamic and open-ended growth paths that are tailor made for individual needs, talents and ambitions. While squiggly can mean moving across companies and industries, it can also mean moving across roles within the same company.
To thrive in this new world of squiggles, professionals and recruiters will need a method to:
Shift focus from career promotions to career progressions
Create a structure that supports career experiments
Evaluate on potential as opposed to just past work experience
Enter the idea of a skills passport. A skills passport could
help professionals upskill in a personalised way based on where they have been and where they want to go
help professionals demonstrate their identity based on transferable skills that get accumulated through upskilling and past work experience
help recruiters profile current peak performers and breakdown roles into different skills
enable the creation of a ‘skills marketplace’ where people can use skills as a common currency to match identities / aspirations with different opportunities
offer a credible verification protocol to standardise the broken system of skills taxonomies
With the accelerating pace of change and access to opportunities, careers are going to be more about who you want to become as compared to what you do. The skills passport could become the ticket to a whole new world of career mobility in the 21st century.
