T3 Network: Skill & Competency Data Translation and Analysis

Skill and Competency Data Can Reduce the Burden on Individuals to Obtain Opportunities 

Skills and competencies are the currency of the labor market. They describe all the things an individual can do which can be observed, measured, or otherwise assessed. Skills and competencies can include any range of knowledge and abilities, from “graphic design” to “bending and threading conduits,” and more.1 By 2030, employers are expected to require increasingly cognitive, technological, and interpersonal skills and competencies, as opposed to manual labor and basic skills.2 This shift presents a challenge for our current and future workforce. In a study of 500 U.S. human resource (HR) professionals, 74% agreed there is already a skills gap, a difference between the skills that employers need and the skills that job seekers possess.3 COVID-19 has worsened this disconnect by accelerating existing workforce trends of automation and increasing the demographic divide between who benefits from technology and who is left out.4 Empowering learners and workers for current and future periods of career transition through clearer signaling of supply and demand in the labor market may help create a more inclusive workforce. The use of data to facilitate the exchange of skills as “currency” in the workforce will be vital for discovering and connecting these individuals to reemployment and upskilling opportunities.5 

Analyses of data about skills and competencies can be used to match open positions to job seekers, enable more robust career planning, tailor educational curricula to job market demand, and identify opportunities for non-traditional or underserved learners. This requires structured data, data sharing and governance, algorithms, applications, research, advocacy, and communities of practice. Together these can improve communications between labor market systems to enhance and scale services for individuals across the touchpoints they use to access information about their education and career, e.g. by supporting the creation of career navigation software for use by career coaches and jobseekers or by improving the filters jobseekers can use to search on job boards. If authors of skill and competency frameworks begin to structure and provide open data licenses for use by the talent ecosystem (everyone involved in the training, education, and workforce sectors), this will enable applications and services using this data to reduce the burden on individuals to match themselves with opportunities and find support. 

The T3 Innovation Network (T3 Network) strives to provide guidance, coordination, and an open data and technology infrastructure to reduce silos between employment, education,6 government, and supporting systems across the talent marketplace. The T3 Network launched in 2018 and is managed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation with support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Lumina Foundation, Microsoft, and Walmart. The network is comprised of more than 500 organizations representing business, government, education, and technology stakeholders working together to build an open, decentralized, public-private infrastructure for education and workforce data. This infrastructure will ultimately support applications that will make it easier to search for and find information on the open web and improve data exchange across the public and private sectors.