Introducing the Credential Registry Pathway Builder

Learning and career pathways provide individuals with structured routes to gain knowledge, skills, and experiences that guide them toward meaningful and fulfilling careers while enabling lifelong learning. Pathways vary for different people and opportunities, so making data transparent helps everyone understand quality, equitable pathways.

The Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) and the Credential Registry provide critical solutions for data transparency. The CTDL-linked open data structure is foundational for creating solutions that benefit everyone. The Pathway Builder tool builds off the data in the Credential Registry to communicate learning and career pathways. This tool enables publishing existing or creating new CTDL pathways. And no matter your role in creating, supporting, and sharing learning and career pathways, the CTDL is beneficial to you and your stakeholders. When ecosystem players work together and publish CTDL-linked open data structures, they are building balanced ecosystems where everyone benefits.  

Our goal is to empower people to build quality CTDL data in the Credential Registry that’s foundational to pathways, and to link the components of learning and career pathways into beneficial human and machine-readable data to power systems and applications.  Using the CTDL and Credential Registry data to build pathways illuminates the best path forward for learners, workers, and employers by providing actionable data.

CTDL Pathways and Credential Registry Pathway Builder

CTDL Pathways are a means of designing and representing progressions towards specific destinations using Pathway Components. In the context of the Credential Registry Pathway Builder, a Pathway Component refers to any entity such as credentials, courses, competencies, extracurricular, work experience, or jobs that can be included in a pathway. The ultimate goal of a pathway is to reach a destination, which is represented by a Pathway Component that signifies where a person could be upon completing the pathway. 

The Credential Registry provides a rich collection of Pathway Components that you can leverage by searching for relevant components and adding them to the Pathway Builder board. In cases where the desired data is not available in the Registry, you have the flexibility to utilize a library of components and combine them with the Registry data.

The Pathway Builder offers a user-friendly drag and drop interface that allows you to visually construct your pathway. By using connectors, you can link the Pathway Components together to depict the progression towards the destination. This intuitive tool enables you to build pathways ranging from simple to complex, seamlessly incorporating data from multiple sources.

Pathway Builder Users:

Pathway Builder users include professionals with organizations that are designing or using existing learning and career pathways to help people achieve their goals. These users desire the ability to visualize pathways, include a mix of components, and share them as CTDL data in the Credential Registry. Users can include:
  • Education, training, and other credentialing organizations
  • Employers
  • Professional associations
  • Other types of organizations designing or housing created pathways

By utilizing the Pathway Builder, these users can effectively design and construct pathways that align with their specific objectives and requirements. The tool provides them with the flexibility to integrate various components, visualize the pathway progression, and publish the pathways to the Credential Registry for wider accessibility and utilization.

Key features of the Pathway Builder include:

  • Pulling in data from the Credential Registry: You can access the wealth of Pathway Components available in the Credential Registry to populate your pathways.
  • Interactive drag and drop tool: The Pathway Builder provides an interactive interface where you can easily arrange and organize Pathway Components according to your desired pathway structure.
  • Build simple or complex pathways: Whether your pathway is straightforward or intricate, the Pathway Builder accommodates pathways of varying complexity.
  • Combine data from multiple sources: In addition to utilizing the Credential Registry, you have the flexibility to incorporate components from other sources, allowing for comprehensive pathway design. You can even create Registry resources on-the-fly while building your pathway.
  • Publish to the Credential Registry: Once you have designed your CTDL pathway, you can publish it to the Credential Registry as CTDL linked open data, making it accessible to others.

Pathway Builder Resources:

To get started, create your Credential Engine account here or login to the Credential Publisher here if you already have an account.

Review the below materials to help you get started with publishing your Pathways to the Credential Registry

Interested in Learning More?

Contact us using the form below.

Name(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Skip to content