Blockchain is poised to change many functions, including corporate learning and development (L&D). In this article, learn four crucial ways blockchain will impact the future of L&D programs, writes Ike Bennion, principal, learning marketing manager at Cornerstone and Board Proxy for the Velocity Network Foundation.
It’s no secret the traditional college degree doesn’t hold the value it once did. A system evolved to prepare individuals for linear careers hasn’t kept up with the breakneck speed of workforce change brought by technology, changed attitudes toward careers, and skills as our new currency. Businesses are feeling the need to step in to fill the skills gap, but how much ground can L&D leaders cover in the couple of years employees now stay at a company?
We can’t easily change these shorter tenures, so the question becomes, how can we help employees port their development progress across companies to better sustain their growth? And in turn keep new hires growing along their path without missing a beat? Organizations can provide them with an immutable and authoritative credential. Blockchain allows them to do exactly that.
Blockchain introduces credentialing to the workplace for data that is verified and personalized for the individual. In a near future with these credentials, workers’ own data that tells the story of their value they’ve developed over their career. In turn, employers make quicker workforce decisions with authoritative data that wasn’t available before to fill needs and sustain growth.
Most of us know about blockchain from Bitcoin, but they aren’t the same. Blockchain is essentially an authoritative database that allows multiple groups to contribute and use data in an orderly and authorized way. It also can extend across the variety of directions a career may take, like to apply to a certification program or a freelance gig. Blockchain is poised to change many functions, including L&D and corporate learning itself in a number of ways.
The Value of an Authoritative Credential
For an employee, the corporate environment often delivers mixed messages when it comes to learning: here’s a list of things you must complete. Oh, by the way take some other courses while you’re at it – it may or may not come with tangible benefits (beyond what you learn). Today your job title serves as that valuable “certification,†but has its most value as you’re leaving a company. For present employers, that’s a problem, especially as learning new skills is becoming a critical need.
For the employee, who can accept and accumulate a lifetime of credentials on a secure wallet on a smartphone, it provides a host of new intrinsic incentives. If I have a history or a set of certifications that can authoritatively speak to the skills learned, motivation for growth and effort to home capabilities, learning can become a powerful asset with promise of rewards in the future. Just like we translate monetary value in and out of currency into goods or services, employees now can transfer the value of their development effort into and out of verified credentials and into future opportunities.
For the employer, an authoritative credential can help motivate employees and also provides a pathway for companies to develop “schools.†Imagine what a consumer marketing certification from Unilever with an embedded transcript does alongside that little three-line entry on a resume. With blockchain as that authoritative credential, companies become a critical pitstop in a longer pathway of career development.
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Personalized Learning From Day One
Like the rest of HR, artificial intelligence has permeated learning but with limitations. Learning is a messy field – you’re trying to match up complex subjects with diverse learners in nuanced contexts. The AI we see in the learning space is focused on taking topics that have been successful in engaging learners in the past and trying to find them something directly or adjacently topical to recommend. To do this, AI has to take messy, often unstructured data and transform it into a machine-readable format, which is uneven in results.
Blockchain credentials, on the other hand, has seen some notable projects, but little widespread adoption in the learning space. As a result, every time a learner leaves a job to start a new one, they have no way to take verified transcripts with them. Just as a new hire must make critical introductions to teammates, AI has to “learn†about this new employee to customize, prescribe, and predict. This takes time, as it accumulates data about habits, interests, and needs. The data embedded within blockchain credentials can be read by you and me but also by AI. Unique identifiers can be affixed to common sets of courses or ones from a single provider shared across companies.
The result is a wealth of information that can be consumed by AI more efficiently and can immediately begin to adapt to the individual. As a result, AI driven by history, interests, skills, formats, and more can quickly drive the right content to personalize learning recommendations for the individual. But what’s a more important outcome is that learners don’t miss a beat in continuing their continuous learning pathway across their careers.
Employers, in turn, have a richer pool of data to understand the unique learning histories of individuals on the micro or macro level. Leadership initiatives, for instance, have common elements but can vary across companies. As roles and workforces become more fluid, this deeper understanding is critical to ensure the L&D professional has data to help them adapt to where their workforce is now and where it’s going.
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Certificates and Their Data
Many certificates are for areas that require continuous development and management. Hybrid blockchain networks allow for many types of organizations to participate in issuing and consuming credentials. For professional organizations who join a hybrid network, for instance, this reduces much of the reporting and verification functions of some of these certification programs. It also helps alleviate management of continuing education credentials and regular functions like reminders of expiration.
For employers this adds value as well. Some AI models allows you to weight certain data points like certain desirable certifications. With blockchain-enabled AI models, certifications can help to provide better clarity on how to staff projects or what skills a certification brings to the table. Additionally, positions where a certification is critical (and the hiring market is usually competitive), like for a nurse or an environmental engineer, employers can verify these credentials instantaneously and make confident hiring decisions on the spot.
Reduction in Compliance Recertification
In regulated industries there are common curriculum with common requirements. But audit logs and data require airtight authority of their own. Compliance completion blockchain credentials have data verification to provide the right data to fulfill audit reporting.
Employees often “ping-pong†back and forth between employers in regulated verticals and have a great level of industry knowledge. Each time an employee moves employers, they lose productivity time during onboarding to complete learning they’re already compliant for. This is a pain for everyone, but particularly for the learner who’d rather ditch the onboarding to-do and begin working.
From the employer perspective, the need for compliance training is actually growing. In one study, 89% of employers were maintaining or increasing the amount of time dedicated to compliance training. But this comes as a trade-off. Every day an employer can cut off of the time onboarding is a day added of productivity. Blockchain credentials allow the opportunity for employers to offset common industry compliance training while focusing on risk areas specific to the business.
The Near Future of Blockchain
What has been described thus far some may think is a time-distant dreamscape. The truth is that’s not the case. There are some notable and active projects that have demonstrated some important value to the market. The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation is actively running pilots with non-government organizations, private business, and others to actively push for networks of credentials that can be used by the American worker. Government entities in Europe are also involved in pushing for scaled digital credentials for the benefit of their citizens as well, in labor and beyond.
Some networks have also emerged that have already started to integrate their blockchain technical architectures with widely used labor and education solutions. These networks each have notable and important milestones slated for 2021 to increase the size and scope of their use. They will likely continue to expand by focusing on “micronetworks†or a more contained workforce and set of employers.
The bottom line for the timing of blockchain is the network effect which can be thought of in the context of another service: credit cards. For the value proposition to be successful, the market needed both holders and retailers who had bought into the network. As the percentage of customers purchasing with cards and retailers accepting cards grew in lockstep with each other the default for many if not all of us is credit. This expansion was accelerated by “complements†like the internet and ecommerce that defaulted to debit or credit cards for payment. These same principles are the same for blockchain. The value of the technology itself is there, now it’s a matter of network.
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