A digital learning passport for everyone

The VocTech Future of Skills Award was designed to share and celebrate big, tech-enabled ideas of how changes to the UK skills system could transform the way adults get the skills they need for work.

In this article we learn more about one of the winning entries, from Paul McCormack.

Explore the other winning entries.

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A digital learning passport for everyone

Everyone should be able to develop the skills they need as and when it suits them and to capture them through a digital ‘skills passport’, Paul McCormack argues, one of three winners of a national competition held to celebrate visions for the future of the UK skills system - Ufi’s VocTech Future of Skills Award.

Just as a passport enables freedom of travel, a skills passport is the document to enable vocational mobility.

Paul, the coordinator of the EU skills project ARISE, believes the time is up for traditional learning and that instead we should be embracing new technologies to gain skills as and when it suits us and to assist the economy in transition.

Paul's winning idea for the competition is to create cryptoSKILL, a system built on blockchain in which we all have a digital learning passport and earn ‘micro-credentials’, or ‘SKILLcoins’, which we “cash in” whenever it suits us for CPD points or accreditation towards a certificate.

A shared ‘currency’ for micro-credentials would help learners, employers and training providers to represent equivalence, giving everyone a “far better picture” of where we are on our skills journey, Paul argues.

“The gap between what industry, the economy and society needs and what's being delivered is widening,” he says. “We need to address the mechanisms to close that gap and make sure people have the skills they need, when they need them, in the way in which they need them.”

Paul believes the current skills system isn’t sufficiently flexible or agile enough and is a “one-size-fits-all”, based on theory, books and class attendance.

“We need to develop a mechanism that complements the current system, but allows it to be modernised,” he says. He feels strongly that digital tools should be used to engage and stimulate with learners, “developing collaborative, active learning environments that stimulate and inspire, creating the time, the space, and the atmosphere to create a work life learning balance”. He describes an active learning space in the digital environment “creating the intersection between cohort-based learning, social learning, and active learning, complimenting the traditional learning process.”

It doesn’t suit everyone to have classes during the day in 40-minute sessions. Paul says he’s found that, at times, he prefers to work from 10pm until 1am, when his home is quiet because it’s more conducive to his learning. “We need to achieve a work, life, learning balance in a new cycle of learning participation, it is not a prescriptive journey, the learner must be in control if we are to achieve success.”

“The current learning process is a maze and the same pathway doesn't suit everybody,” he says. “You should be able to tailor your learning based on the micro-skills and the micro-credentials you want, build up your digital skills passport and create the credentials you need.”

Without this, he believes, there is huge untapped potential that individuals, and society is missing out on. After all, he says, not everyone wants - or is able - to take time off work to study or to travel to take a class.

The current system, Paul feels, creates a “mechanism for exclusion”. But with new technologies available to us, we should all be able to develop our skills, including those of us who may not feel that we fit into traditional education settings. While we are not all comfortable sitting in front of a class and putting our hands up, as seen in our last VocTech Challenge: Levelling up Learning, technology can be a key to unlock learning.

“We should be able to see learners as they are - not just as a single dimensional qualification certificate,” Paul says. “Skills need to be about more than education and qualifications. They show what each of us bring to our jobs, our society, our family and our community”.

Using Blockchain technology to keep track of and demonstrate our skills would enable a more flexible and continuing approach to learning - something that will be increasingly important to support the jobs and industries of the future.

Paul argues that to ensure his vision becomes reality, there are a number of changes that need to be made to the UK skills system. Among the most important is ensuring the system is less fragmented, one of the key findings of our recent White Paper and a focus of our current VocTech Challenge: Skills for an economy in Transition. The information available to learners must be much clearer so that we can all navigate opportunities more easily. This, he says, requires a change of mindset, with the learner at the centre.