First Stackable, End-to-End Credentialing Integration for XCredit

Discover how Credentialate enabled the Education Design Lab (the Lab) to build a groundbreaking, fully integrated system for stackable credentialing. Learn how this innovative solution seamlessly connects assessment, badging, digital signing, and resume building to provide learners with comprehensive and verifiable recognition for their evolving skills.

In their own words

“Connecting the XCredit ecosystem was an exciting technical and human challenge, and the result is a blueprint for scalable, skills-first credentialing. The success of this initiative signals that high-quality, interoperable recognition of life and work experience isn’t a future aspiration – it’s achievable right now with the right design and the right partnerships.”

Tara Laughlin, EdD – Director, Skills Validation + Development, Education Design Lab

Objectives

Imagine a world where your real-life experiences – the skills you’ve honed on the job, through community work, or simply navigating life’s challenges – are valued just as much as a traditional degree. For many, especially non-traditional students, career changers, and the growing number of gig workers, that world often feels out of reach. Traditional credentials frequently fall short of capturing the rich tapestry of their capabilities, creating a frustrating disconnect between what they can do and what employers see.

These individuals, often described as STARs – those Skilled Through Alternative Routes – face significant hurdles in a job market that often defaults to a degree as the primary marker of talent. Pursuing a traditional degree can be an insurmountable barrier due to high costs, time constraints, and the lack of a guaranteed job at the end. Tragically, many who embark on this path don’t complete their studies, leaving them with debt and still without tangible proof of their valuable skills. Yet, those who forge alternative pathways often develop vital, durable skills comparable to those gained in academic settings.

Solution

Driven by the belief that education is the most powerful engine for economic mobility, the Education Design Lab (the Lab) is dedicated to understanding and addressing these learner experiences. As a non-profit organisation, the Lab co-designs, prototypes, and tests innovative education-to-workforce models through a human-centred lens. Supported by numerous funding partners, they collaborate with community colleges, single mothers, veterans, and other new majority learners to ease the transition from education to meaningful employment.

To directly tackle the challenge of unrecognised skills, the Lab launched the XCredit (Experience Credit) project. The vision was bold: to validate a learner’s life and work experiences as genuine currency for future opportunities. Building upon their framework of nine durable competencies, each with specific sub-skills, the Lab partnered with a range of leading technology solution providers to create an end-to-end, evidence-based skills recognition ecosystem. This collaborative effort included:

Unicon – providing crucial integration consulting for the system’s design and development.
D2L (Brightspace) – the learning management system hosting the microcredentials and tracking learner progress to avoid redundant assessments.
Muzzy Lane – delivering experiential learning simulations and authentic assessments that mirror real workplace scenarios.
Credly – the badge agent issuing Open Badges to recognise both full competencies and individual skills.
SmartResume – providing learners with a dynamic, AI-generated resume that showcases their verified skills to employers.

Initially, the integration of these powerful systems revealed gaps in data connections and mobility, hindering the seamless user experience the Lab desired. To bridge these gaps and orchestrate a smooth flow of information, the Lab partnered with Edalex to deploy their Credentialate platform. Through a deeply learner-centric approach, the team collaboratively mapped each step of the process to ensure structured data transfer between the disparate systems. Despite the complexity of the commands and the number of systems involved, Credentialate successfully managed the data flow, bringing the Lab’s vision to life.

Outcome

The result is the XCredit ecosystem: a truly interoperable, end-to-end skills credentialing ecosystem that adheres to the Open Badge 3.0 standard. Adhering to the Open Badges 3.0 standard is crucial for ensuring the authenticity, portability, and interoperability of digital credentials. It enhances the credibility of achievements, allows learners to showcase their skills across different platforms, and provides a more secure and user-centered experience. With Credentialate as its core, the system automates the flow of data, eliminating manual input. From the learner’s perspective, their skills are seamlessly earned through authentic assessments, validated against real-world scenarios, recognised with digital credentials, and integrated into a dynamically updated resume ready to be shared with employers. Each earned skill and competency builds confidence and provides clear, employer-recognised proof of learning.

Since its launch in July 2024, the XCredit ecosystem has already impacted over 4,500 learners and issued more than 5,000 sub-competency credentials and 700 full competency badges across eight workforce organisations. This Walmart-funded initiative, offered at no cost to learners and pilot organisations, significantly reduces administrative burden while boosting learner employability, credential completion, and institutional relevance. The robust, standards-aligned integration positions XCredit as a future-ready solution for institutions and employers alike – accelerating skills-based hiring and creating a clear, scalable pathway from learning to employment.

The XCredit project stands as a market-leading example of the power of an intentional, human-centred mindset combined with cutting-edge technology to deliver personalised, learner-centric outcomes.

This impactful work has been recognised as a finalist in the prestigious 2025 Learning Impact Awards, awarded by 1EdTech.

Watch the award submission video below to see an overview of how the fully integrated system works: