Verifiable

Credentials

Wallets

in

a

Skills-First

Talent

Marketplace

An update to the 2022 Jobs for the Future (JFF) market scan Building a Skills-Based Talent Marketplace, this scan shows the substantial momentum behind digital wallets and explores their impact on system-level transformations in education and workforce development that are critical to addressing current challenges facing learners and jobseekers.

Key Insights From the Report

• The future is digital: By 2026, more than 500 million smartphone users worldwide will be using digital identity wallets regularly for day-to-day activities.
• Worker demand is strong: In a JFFLabs survey, 75% of jobseekers polled said they would find a digital wallet helpful in their job searches.
• Wallets are having a real impact: From supporting immigrant workers to streamlining disaster response, digital wallets are already making a difference.
• A global movement is underway: Countries worldwide are adopting digital ID systems, with the EU planning universal implementation of digital identity wallets by 2026.

Opportunities for Impact

Verifiable Credentials Wallets in a Skills-First Talent Marketplace identifies four areas where digital wallets provide opportunities for impact.

Lifelong Learning: Digital wallets enable people to collect and manage credentials from multiple sources throughout their careers, with open standards ensuring that credentials are interoperable, portable, and verifiable. Wallet users also benefit from new features like skills analysis and career pathway recommendations.

Individual Agency and Control: Wallet users maintain control over their credentials, choosing what information to share and with whom. Credential issuers using renderMethod can provide an array of choices of how and where a credential can be visually displayed.

Privacy: Advanced technologies like BBS signature suites allow selective disclosure of information, ensuring that users share only relevant details while maintaining personal privacy.

Universal Accessibility: Innovations in wallet-enabled storage, multilingual capabilities, and paper-based backup options are making digital credentials accessible to a wide range of populations.

Why It Matters

Real world implementations demonstrate the technology’s versatility and impact, including:

• Learners and jobseekers often struggle to seamlessly share and verify their educational achievements across institutions and employers—ASU’s Trusted Learner Network and ASU Pocket empower them with verifiable digital credentials, ensuring greater control, portability, and trust in their skills and accomplishments.
• Workers and job site supervisors need a faster, more reliable way to prove valid qualifications and stay compliant, and Credivera helps by providing instant, verifiable digital credentials that enhance safety, streamline access, and reduce administrative burdens.
• Emergency responders and other rapid response service providers need a fast and reliable way to verify identities and skills—Digital Bazaar’s verifiable credential system enables instant validation, ensuring the right people are deployed quickly while also helping disaster victims regain access to essential services.
• Farmworkers and others in vulnerable populations, who often struggle to access essential aid and services because they lack official identification and must repeatedly verify their identity with multiple nonprofits—Entidad’s digital wallet solution streamlines this process, giving them control over their information while ensuring secure and trusted access to support.
• Verifiers, such as institutions or employers need a reliable way to confirm the identity of credential issuers without relying on centralized platforms—trust registries streamline this process by providing a trusted source for issuer verification, and MIT-DCC’s collaboration with Credential Engine is advancing standardized guidelines to support this functionality in learning and employment ecosystems.

How to Get Started

If your organization is looking to implement a digital wallet solution, this market scan includes a vendor selection framework that provides questions to ask prospective vendors and a list of resources to help you choose the digital wallet and tools that best support your skills-first transformation.

LERs Are Just the Beginning

Digital wallets for verifiable credentials offer a way to store and share comprehensive digital records of skills, serving as the best foundation for digital learning and employment records (LER). These wallets provide critical infrastructure that supports the adoption of skills-first talent practices that give employers a fuller picture of individuals’ abilities, thus opening doors for people who are often overlooked by traditional recruiting practices and applicant-tracking tools.

The open standards that support the LER technology ecosystem ensure that these digital records are authentic, transparent, and secure, and that they accurately express the skills of their holders. These characteristics may also transform our education, workforce, and technology systems and redefine our relationships in the digital world.

If you’re interested in exploring how this technology can support your digital transformation efforts, please connect with us.