Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed “Career Passport” aims to streamline job seekers’ credentials into a digital portfolio, making it easier for employers to recognize individuals’ skills and experiences.
While the concept may seem promising, the reality is that learning employment records (LERs) — the foundation of the Career Passport — are still in the early stages of development and adoption. Few employers and job seekers currently use them, and the technology remains largely unknown and untested.
Before the government spends $100 million in taxpayer dollars on technology that lacks meaningful adoption and trust, the focus should be on allowing innovators to first develop LER technology that is valid, reliable and useful for both employers and job seekers.
The Career Passport is not the state’s first attempt at a large-scale education and workforce data initiative. The Cradle-to-Career (C2C) data system, which was supposed to create a seamless record of Californians’ educational and career progress, remains years behind schedule and is still largely theoretical. Furthermore, the effort is a prime example of the state’s poor track record in this space. C2C marketed itself as a system that would stitch together “data from multiple education systems” only to deliver none of that to date. If the state cannot successfully deliver on even the first leg of the C2C system, why should we expect better results from a Career Passport? Rather than spreading thin, already dwindling resources and distracting an overburdened state workforce with another massive set of promises, the state should focus on completing the work it has already spent money on and not yet delivered.
Before attempting to implement the Career Passport, California should wait until the innovation sector has figured out how to make learning employment records that work at scale, demonstrate real value in the hiring process and earn buy-in from employers and job seekers. Pouring state funds into largely experimental technology at this point risks wasting taxpayer money during a $68 billion budget deficit.
Moreover, the state government is the wrong entity to drive innovation at this stage. The bureaucratic inefficiencies associated with public-sector initiatives — lengthy procurement processes, cumbersome regulations, and political red tape — will not ensure success. Instead, the state’s involvement will disrupt and possibly undermine existing voluntary collaborations already making headway in developing learning employment records and similar technology. The state’s proposal to put itself as the driver of this work risks turning what is currently a collaborative ecosystem, into a competitive battle for state dollars, stifling innovation rather than fostering it.
California should allow the innovation sector to do what it does best — collaborate, experiment and refine solutions until they are proven effective. What needs to happen — and is already happening — is that learning employment records companies, educational institutions, employers, and other innovators are working together to figure out how to develop and refine these technologies in ways that employers and learners trust, which will lead to adoption. This process of collaboration and iteration is essential to ensuring that they become a useful and reliable tool in the job market.
Government intervention at this stage, particularly a massive infusion of public funds, risks disrupting collaboration, creating unnecessary noise and slowing down true innovation. During this crucial innovation phase, the government needs to stay out of the way and allow the private and nonprofit sectors to innovate freely. Only after learning employment records have demonstrated their value and reliability in effectively matching talent to jobs, should the state consider spending money on their widespread adoption.
If Gov. Newsom genuinely wants to improve how Californians translate their education and experiences into career opportunities, he should wait until the technology is ready rather than disrupting innovation and placing a massive bet on an experiment. And, he should recognize that it is far too early to invest state dollars in such a venture.
Job hunting may be awful, but California’s employers and job seekers deserve better than just another set of unfulfilled promises.
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Alex Barrios serves as president of Educational Results Partnership, a nonprofit data science organization that developed Cal-PASS Plus, California’s first intersegmental longitudinal data system, and founded the ERP Institute to promote educator and employer collaboration to improve the efficiency of talent to job matching.
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