By Michelle Mott, ̽»¨Â¥ Consultant, Innovative Credentials Project Manager, Live from Convergence 2025
At the recent Conference, four pioneering institutions from the LER Accelerator cohort shared candid insights about implementing Learning and Employment Records—the challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons learned along the way.
Representatives from Alamo Colleges District, Dallas College, Marshall University, and Johns Hopkins University proved that while the path to transforming credentials is complex, it's also full of practical wisdom for others embarking on this journey.
The LER Accelerator Initiative
Launched in 2024 with support from Walmart, the LER Accelerator brings together 23 trailblazing institutions and a coalition of 13 leading national organizations representing the campus stakeholders responsible for implementing LERs. The initiative's mission is ambitious: to accelerate the adoption of skills-centered innovative credentials in higher education by addressing the key challenges that have hindered their implementation.
LERs as a Process
The initiative emphasizes a crucial insight: LERs aren't a single product or static credential, but an ongoing process, a complex, iterative effort requiring institutional change, cross-sector collaboration, and sustained coalition building.
Think of LERs as part of a credentialing continuum that progresses from physical documents (like paper transcripts) through digitized records and digital badges, to web-hosted credentials, and ultimately to verifiable credentials with tamper-evident, digitally-signed data. Institutions find themselves at different points along this continuum, and the LER Accelerator provides the guidance, tools, and community to help them advance with integrity and purpose.
Four Institutions, Four Distinct Approaches
Alamo Colleges District: Connecting Learning to Work
For Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio, the mission is crystal clear. "Our moonshot is to end poverty in San Antonio," said Amber O’Casey, Director of Microcredentials at Alamo Colleges Online. For this community college district, making the connection between learners and the workplace isn't just a priority; it's the bottom line.
Alamo is taking a convening approach to build momentum around LERs, bringing together vice presidents, deans, academic and student success leaders, career services, students, and faculty badge advocates. The strategy recognizes a reality many institutions face: initiative fatigue. By being intentional about how they use people's time and respectful of their bandwidth, Alamo aims to build sustainable engagement rather than brief enthusiasm.
The district is also navigating the complex funding landscape in Texas, where there are actual dollars on the line tied to capturing credential data in standardized ways: opportunities they haven't been able to fully leverage yet because of data interoperability challenges.
Dallas College: Learning by Doing
Dallas College has taken a "learn by doing" approach. With a chancellor who has said "go, go now and do it fast," the college is balancing urgency with thoughtfulness.
“They're starting with discrete pilots, like working with their pharmacy program, which serves multiple purposes: engaging stakeholders who may never have heard these concepts, socializing the language across campus, and building institutional buy-in incrementally,” said Amy Mackenroth, Associate Deputy Chancellor, National Partnerships & Innovation at Dallas College. The institution is also tackling one of higher education's most stubborn challenges: cataloging all credentials across the college, especially the divide between non-credit and credit offerings.
Marshall University: Honoring Context While Driving Change
Marshall University's story illustrates the delicate balance between innovation and institutional culture. The university experienced significant leadership turnover in 2022, with a new president and virtually the entire cabinet transitioning to new roles. This created both opportunity and complexity.
Marshall's focus on the non-credit to credit integration space reveals a common higher education problem: scalability. The university had one person determining credit equivalencies and writing letters to the registrar—a process that clearly couldn't scale. Their participation in the LER Accelerator initiative gave them a catalyst to join a national conversation and push for policy changes that had remained stagnant.
What makes Marshall's approach noteworthy is their emphasis on deep empathy interviews with stakeholders before bringing everyone together. Before rushing to solutions, they're conducting deep empathy interviews with 25 stakeholders to understand concerns and possibilities. This approach acknowledges that change management isn't just about having the right technology but also about honoring the work people have done while creating space for new possibilities.
"There is a culture and a context that I need to honor when trying to convert things in a different direction,” said Julia Spears, Assistant Provost of Online Education and Certification at Marshall University. “We have many people on my team who have been there for 40 years. They've seen lots of different presidents. This is just one of the many things.”
Johns Hopkins University: Eight Years in the Making
Johns Hopkins brings a different perspective as a research university focused on degree-bearing programs. Their LER journey began eight years ago when leaders of learning assessment came together while preparing for an accreditation visit. What emerged was a vision to capture assessment in both curricular and co-curricular spaces and reflect that for students more robustly than a flat transcript.
“The university chose to focus on what they call a Comprehensive Learner Record rather than specifically emphasizing 'employment' in the name, a deliberate choice that reflects their faculty's focus on learning rather than job preparation,” noted Janet Schreck, Senior Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and Chadia Abras, Senior Director of Institutional Assessment at Johns Hopkins University. The institution views the CLR as a tool for employers, for student development, and for helping students develop metacognitive awareness of what they're learning.
Hopkins' journey began eight years ago with a vision to capture assessment in both curricular and co-curricular spaces. After years of work, they've achieved their first version—but shared a critical observation: "I don't feel like the right voices are driving how tech is creating CLRs. I think it's being driven by quick wins, but not the really deep things that we need," said Schreck.
Common Challenges Among First Movers
Despite different contexts, all four institutions face similar hurdles:
The Technology Puzzle: How do systems talk to each other? Who owns the data? Can platforms actually return data in usable formats? Turnover means institutional memory gets lost about why systems were purchased in the first place.
The People Factor: Change management resistance runs deep in higher education. Faculty defensiveness about transparent learning assessment. Long-serving staff who've seen initiatives come and go. The tension between innovative leadership and middle management resistance.
Student Understanding and Agency: Building sophisticated systems means nothing if students don't understand how to use them or translate their experiences into employer-relevant language. Success requires explicit training and support, not assumptions about student digital literacy.
The Language Barriers: The proliferation of terms and acronyms creates confusion even among practitioners. CLR, LER, digital badges, verifiable credentials, comprehensive learner records, learning and employment records—what do they all mean, and how do they relate to each other?
The LER Accelerator coalition recently released a to make it easier for learners, educators, and employers to talk about digital credentials in a clear, consistent way.
What Success Looks Like
When asked about success beyond their individual institutions, the panelists painted a compelling vision:
Employer integration with applicant tracking systems and HR platforms, not just educational technology.
Student translation skills to articulate learning and capabilities effectively.
Seamless ecosystems where all credentials are digital and all systems communicate.
Student agency to own and leverage their learning data throughout their careers.
The Road Ahead
The candor displayed by these institutions is refreshing and instructive. They're not claiming to have all the answers. They're acknowledging the messiness, the false starts, the cultural challenges, and the technical complications—while continuing to push forward because they believe in the ultimate goal: better serving learners and helping them succeed in life and work.
Their participation in the LER Accelerator cohort provides community, shared resources, and guiding principles for moving forward with integrity. But perhaps equally valuable is the permission to experiment, fail, learn, and iterate—recognizing that building the future of credentials is a process, not a destination.
For institutions considering their own LER journey, these pioneers offer clear lessons:
Start where you are.
Build coalitions thoughtfully.
Honor your institutional context.
Focus on learner needs.
Don't underestimate the time required for meaningful change.
The future of credentials is being built today, one institution, one stakeholder conversation, one pilot program at a time.
Learn more about the LER Accelerator initiative. For additional guidance on developing collaborative, equitable, secure, and interoperable credentialing systems, explore the and other key resources housed in the.