Technical Addition to “The Case for a New Resume”
This weekend as I was tagged by a former colleague Nidhi Hebbar in a LinkedIn post with her article entitled “The Case For a New Resume”. It was an engaging, smart read and so refreshing to be reminded of the big picture with renewed excitement and clarity of execution. If you haven’t read it, please do so first.
I want to follow up with some technical details that not everyone may be aware of. It’s actually a very exciting time to be in education technology because interoperability between products is becoming a reality — the ability to use any edtech product with any other one due to defined specifications. Thus, this article is primarily for educators/companies who are involved in some parts of this work but maybe at the end-user level — universities, k12 teachers and administrators, etc. I will use technical language so that you would be able to talk to developers about the ideas but not so technical as to not be able to understand what’s happening at all.
Nidhi lays out out three things that resumes need to convey: 1) How a person thinks; 2) What a person is capable of doing, and 3) How we work with others
As a former classroom teacher who has worked for a startup and a major assessment+learning+navigation company (ACT), I have been able to see both the detailed and big picture view of where we have been and were we are going technology wise. I’m not a futurist; I’d much rather talk about what AI can do for students now or next year as opposed to 10 years from now.
How a Person Thinks
Portfolios seem to be the best solution for cataloging and analyzing how a person thinks. Much like LinkedIn is often seen as a dynamic resume, where work experience along with public recommendations from colleagues can be published, a portfolio should allow for storage of a lot of work with the ability to display it. As far as i know there isn’t a standard interoperability specification for digital portfolios — that is, a way of showcasing student work in a variety of formats across the years, linked to standards and other pertinent information.
What a Person is Capable of Doing
There is a wide variety of work being done here essentially to help learners grow.
In Bloom’s taxonomy, the first three levels are generally accepted to be lower level skills — that is, based more on memorization rather than analytical thinking. These are where we see online systems with short quizzes etc even if they have semi-automatic feedback. In the moment of an assessment, students often aren’t able to take the time to analyze and reflect — which is where the true learning through assessment happens. To make this happen, we have a few specifications to standardize what information is passed through during this process. Essentially I’ve simplified this into documenting learning experience, the results of that experience, showcasing results and then storing it and connecting to future opportunities.
Learning Experiences: CASE is a technical specification that defines the competencies of what a student needs to know — the targets and goals of learning. CASE is to learning frameworks as the mp3 format was to digital music that made ‘digital’ music ubiquitous. Statements in the CASE format may refer to curriculum objects such as a textbooks or digital learning resources such as interactives, videos etc. CASE is also able to associate various other learning objectives (e.g. local math standards to national frameworks). It is worth noting that although standards are published by states in PDF, machine-readable standards exist at the CASE Network for edtech vendors, states and K12 districts to use and be able to integrate into their learning software systems.
Assessment: Caliper is a specification that captures assessment events as they’re called… basically anything about what happens when a student is taking any type of assessment. From the specification’s description — “Annotating a reading, playing a video, taking a test, or grading an assignment submission represent a few examples of the many activities or events that Caliper’s metric profiles attempt to describe.” Personally one thing I like about Caliper is that it doesn’t limit assessment to something formal, which should be happening more and more as formative assessment becomes more natural, integrated and holistic.
Showing and Storingthe Learning: Open Badges or microcredentials are the way that learners can showcase and store information about what they’ve learned from a variety of platforms in one place. I’ve previously written about how CASE is important for showing the specific skills learned. Open Badges can also be connected as integrated pathways to both show progress and lead to other opportunities.
CLR (Comprehensive Learner Record) is an interoperable format for storing information about what a student knows. It’s here that open badges (microcredentials) can be gathered alongside transcript information from a variety of institutions and organizations, as well as informal learning experiences such as, “volunteer non-profit experience”. There is an exciting initiative called PIVOT recently announced to better organize k-12 and post-secondary institutions to adopt competency based transcripts. This is a big part of what Nidhi’s article calls for, because not only does the record of learning now belong to the student, but systems will be able to see a complete picture of that learning — not just a GPA.
How We Work with Others
Social emotional learning (Soft Skills, Essential Skills, many names…) is how we work with others. The ACT Holistic Framework for example has thousands of these traits defined, and assessments are being developed that help pinpoint and showcase these concepts for students. I really enjoyed reading one suggestion of being able to incorporate language used in employer reviews to give candidates a way to concretely showcase how they interact with others in a more organic, and thus powerful way. It’s the same principle of how manufacturers reviews of a product are far less influential than reviews or even moreso, a friend who loves a particular product! Again, these skills can be expressed in CASE to be machine readable and then connected to any type of content, assessment, or outside machine learning engine.
Connecting Education to Career
From the article:
…applications today have focused on verifying whether candidates truly have a credential, but it may be more critical for technology to assess the the value of a granted credential.
Organizations such as Credential Engine are aiming to not just store any credential in an interoperable format, but allow for discovery of options and verified evidence. It’s not enough to know that someone is certified in welding, but how were the welds certified and won’t make your building collapse? There is huge opportunity for organizations with solid reputations in Credentialing to capture market share simply by being trusted — the American Welding Society vs Uncle Joe’s Welding Academy makes a world of difference. (2019 Report on Credentials here). As a former teacher who still keeps current a mathematics teaching credential, this is exciting to not only prolong the life of a credential, but able to show the value of that learning even if it wasn’t a degree.
Lifelong Learning and Resumes
Often called re-skilling, this is one of the most interesting and for me, relevant areas mentioned and I feel, the biggest needs. As a 36 year old who certainly used what I learned in my BA(‘05) and MA(‘13) programs for 10 years as an educator, I directly use that knowledge less now and more rely on the experiences attained as a result of those degrees to guide and inform my current work. I feel the same is probably true for most people — accountants learn the best practices for business and the facts in school, but have to be continually updated with new laws and requirements as they progress in their careers and probably do different types of activities etc.
All this being said, the skill terms used on a resume should match what is on a job description one is looking for — but often don’t. Moreover, academic competencies are different than the workforce competencies one may be looking for. To solve this complex problem the T3 Innovation Network, who is working on JDX, or Job Data Exchange — machine readable labor market skills data. Being able to link in demand job description skills with underlying competencies can help find and evaluate new opportunities for job seekers as well as help employers. How does this promise from the JDX website not sound exciting — and entirely possible — for the future of work?
More accurately, if a student is graduating high school and identified as having excellent communication skills but lackluster grades, they could be recommended for jobs such as a salesperson in an industry they have hobbies and/or are passionate about — perhaps baseball or sales etc. Or a plumber working for a school district is identified as having excellent project management skills through job evaluations and perhaps could be placed in a leadership program within the district to help teach others how to best manage projects. The goal of a system of identification of key skills and competencies must not limit what students can show, but rather help provide more opportunities.
Conclusion
Technology should always work to enable equity and efficiency, not limit and hinder everyone discovering and attaining their best career(s). Much of the technology is already in place at the specification level, and industries are working on publishing existing content in those formats for maximum flexibility and the ability to use machine-learning etc to augment discoverability. Open technology specifications are the future to enable not just better resumes, but better lives.
