As Chief of Adult Learning and Training for the Alabama Community College System, a former U.S. Department of Education official, and a Credential Engine Board Member, Nick Moore brings a rare vantage point to the education and workforce data challenge. He has seen and worked within it from both the federal policy level and the ground floor of state implementation. We sat down with Nick as part of our Five Minutes with… spotlight series, asking him to shed a light on what credential transparency makes possible, what’s at stake when it’s absent, and what it will take from a policy and state level to make structured, open data the norm rather than the exception. Read on for our conversation. You can also watch the video versions of this interview here.
*Transcript was lightly edited for clarity and readability
Credential Engine: You bring experience in both federal policy and on-the-ground state implementation. What does credential transparency enable for talent marketplaces that wouldn’t be possible without it?
Nick Moore: Well, first of all, appreciate the time today and thank you for allowing me to join you. Credential transparency, CTDL is the Rosetta Stone that helps us to serve as the common denominator between credit and non-credit programs, degree and non-degree programs.
For years within education, workforce, and economic development, we’ve been trying to come up with a shared language between the supply and the demand sides of the labor market. That language really needs to be skills as the most granular level of measurement in the labor market. Before CTDL, and truly before we had generative AI to be coupled with CTDL, it still required a lot of manual work and data entry of being able to determine what are all of the attributes of a program and a credential that would be mapped into CTDL.
The exciting thing now is that we can, you know, do a direct integration with a system of record at a school, or with an employer with their HR system, and to be able to get the provenance data to help code, whether it’s a course outcome. Or somebody’s joint service transcript if they’re a veteran, and to be able to glean all of those sort of micro-level skill statements, and be able to do that at scale without having to ask somebody to do triplicate layers of manual data entry.
Credential Engine: Your current role is for the statewide community college system in Alabama, and community colleges are often an entry point for adult learners or people looking to upskill for better career options. For these folks, every dollar and every credit hour counts. What do you see as a real cost if credential data is not transparent or portable?
Nick Moore: Part of the reason why the federal public workforce system and the Title IV-funded Higher Education Act programs, why there’s always been this sort of coyote-esque goal of getting better outcomes data [is] because we don’t have data on course outcomes or value added in economic terms. That was always more of a guesswork, or something that was layered on at the very highest level.
With CTDL and with the opportunity to be able to say, here are the actual skills that someone would learn in a course, or if you could attribute skills data onto someone’s transcript and actually make those skills transcriptable, you can also make them transcribable and transactable.
By the time someone is able to curate all the skills they’ve mastered in a particular course of study — whether it’s high school or it’s post-secondary — we will have more of a two-generation strategy to be able to: escalate young people more quickly into post-secondary education or the workforce; allow somebody to be able to graduate high school; to complete a registered apprenticeship; an associate degree — while also still having a life and being in the band or play football or sports.
And then for an adult, they have multiple points of entry and exit: I may want to go and get a micro-credential or a short-term certificate that’s equatable to 9 to 12 credit hours, and then get a progressive wage increase, and then reset that cycle as many times as I need to, to go from a job to a better job to a career.
So, for community colleges, because we do have for-credit, non-credit programs, we’re serving populations that are the traditional 2- to 4-year transfer population, also dual enrollment populations from K-12. But to me, the most important and critical set of students we have to serve are adults who — and young people, 16 to 24 year old students and citizens — who are not participating in the labor force. In Alabama, we have one of the lowest levels of labor force participation in the country. Nationally, we see a huge problem with labor force participation, and if we want to reinvigorate economic, social, and geographic mobility, we’ve got to do a better job of helping people transition off of means-tested transfer payments and to turn benefit cliffs into benefit slopes.
That’s where having better labor market intelligence, a more prescriptive connection between the supply and the demand side, and using skills as the common denominator between our academic programs and the labor market gives us the tools that we need to create the circumstances for people to overcome a reliance on transfer payments and become dependent on wages through paid employment to reach self-sufficiency.
Credential Engine: You have been a strong champion of advocating for policies that make credential and skills transparency the norm rather than the exception. What is your advice for other states wanting to do this work right?
Nick Moore: I would say join with states like Alabama, states in your region who want to create regional coalitions of the willing. Eventually, we’re going to have to have a national standard on data quality and mobility. Much like there was a benign but very important federal role in rural electrification or the National Interstate Highway System, the work that states and regions can do is to help elevate best practices, and eventually USDOL and ED will scaffold into competitive grant competitions that hopefully, Congress will pick up on for future WIOA reauthorizations.
We know we’re going to need more regular formula-based funding in lieu of one-off data quality grants like WDQI [Workforce Data Quality Initiative] and SLDS [Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems]. But to get there, I think the federal government, and particularly the current administration, wants to see those proof points from states and from regions. It’ll make it a lot easier to codify those elements.
Much like we’ve got to have a 21-year-old drinking age to be able to get highway trust fund dollars to support building highways in the state, I hope we get to a point to where the feds will say: “states, you must do this number of things in regard to data quality and transparency, particularly around non-degree credentials, in order to unlock your ability to apply for these pot of federal funds.”
It’s a way to keep the federal role in an appropriate and, as I said, benign actor that does not merely dangle a pot of federal funds over a state or a region to try to change their policy vector. If it’s something that states and regions have already agreed to, now we’re just using the federal funds as a catalyst to help standardize that. So that in the same way that if I cross from Alabama into Georgia, the width of the lane doesn’t change on me over, you know, surreptitiously, we want to have the same level of standards for credential transparency and interoperability. That eventually state-level talent marketplaces are not constricted by geographic and political boundaries, knowing that most people in the country operate across more than one state boundary. If you just think of the tri-state area between Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, and how many people live in one state and move to another, or the DMV, and around the Capital District. We’ve got to have talent marketplaces that allow people to take their skills with them where they go, irrespective of something as light and transient of a cause as a state political boundary.