Pathways to Success: A Learner-Centered Toolkit for Building Inclusive Learning and Employment Solutions

Learning and employment record (LER) technologies are adaptable tools that help learners and workers showcase their skills and experiences throughout their lives. As more institutions adopt LER technologies, providers must ensure these digital records are valuable, meaningful, and accessible to everyone in their personal pathways to success. Digital Promise created Pathways Unlocked: A Learner-Centered Toolkit for Usable Learning & Employment Record Technologies to help organizations build inclusive and equitable LER implementations that benefit all learners and allow them to exercise more autonomy and agency.

We adopted a learner-centered approach that recognizes the technological barriers that learners may experience, using real-world insights to address their needs. This toolkit offers resources and templates to create LER technology solutions that empower learners from all backgrounds to present their skills, achievements, competencies, and growth in a way employers and educational institutions understand, while aiming to address common design issues that can create barriers for learners (e.g., complex interfaces, inaccessible language, or lack of cultural and situational context). This toolkit will help LER technology designers and implementing institutions embrace an inclusive, learner-centered approach to developing features or supports.

What’s in the Toolkit?

The toolkit provides a collection of practical resources and best practices to help streamline the design process for anyone aiming to create learner-centered LER solutions, including:

• Customizable templates for user research
• The basics of core IUX concepts and how to align best practices
• An overview of methodologies that can be used to build inclusivity
• Techniques to transform insights into actionable implementations

By prioritizing users in the design process, teams can ensure that their solutions are relevant and meaningful to the learner experience.

Real World Benefits

Everyone wins when learners have a seamless way to showcase their accomplishments: learners gain confidence in their abilities, allowing them to plan their learning journeys to fit their unique goals, while employers gain easy access to qualified candidates and a deeper understanding of skill fit. Centering inclusive practices in the design and implementation of LER technologies fosters trust and credibility, resulting in tools that encourage and support lifelong learning, address barriers, and also have the ability to scale and evolve.

Ready to Build a More Inclusive Future for Credentialing?

Explore the resources in Pathways Unlocked: A Learner-Centered Toolkit for Usable Learning & Employment Record Technologies to start integrating learner perspectives and accessibility standards into your development and transform your solution to drive engagement, broaden opportunities, and champion equity and accessibility for all learners.