THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Planning for a Skills-Based Future
For working learners who are considering a change, calculating the return on investment—of both money and time—is crucial. Students have always deserved educational opportunities aligned with workforce needs and employment opportunities, but the significant rise in the cost of higher education makes this alignment even more critical.
The promise of higher education must lead to better lives for students and their families. It’s imperative that we map skills and competencies achieved through education to real-world, in-demand skills for hiring purposes.
As people move between learning and jobs, they need to be able to communicate all the skills they have acquired in different contexts. Similarly, employers and educators need to be able to understand skills that people bring with them from somewhere else. WGU is working to solve this problem by developing a skills-based approach to learning and hiring, along with the necessary ecosystem to support both.
WGU led the creation of the Open Skills Network (OSN), a partnership of over 150 employers and educational institutions committed to the creation of a shared skills-based language and infrastructure that benefits both individuals and employers. The OSN seeks to solve this problem as a collective advocate and innovation engine for creating a decentralized national network of open, accessible, machine-actionable skills libraries.
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