⬇️ Inside this issue:

• Thania on why AI might be making women bossier—in the best way

• The Credential Landscape: Coursework providers take the spotlight

• The Brené Brown episode every modern leader should hear

INTERESTING READS

📊 Purpose and pay don’t always align, says new job quality data from JFF and Gallup.

⚖️ Misused labor stats are putting working women in the political crossfire.

🤖 A new bill would let victims sue AI companies when algorithms cause harm.

🧭 Career breaks are a launchpad, not a setback.

WORKPLACE

How AI is creating bossier women (in a good way)

I have a theory: AI is going to create a generation of more confident, assertive women.

Think about it. Prompt engineering requires clear, direct communication. You can't hedge with ChatGPT.

You can't say "hey, it would be so nice if you could maybe write a marketing brief?" and expect good results.

You have to be direct: "Write a 500-word marketing brief for a B2B SaaS product targeting HR leaders. Include three pain points and two case studies."

No apologies. No softening. Just clear instructions. And here's the thing: the AI doesn't judge you for it. It just gives you exactly what you asked for. The better your prompt, the better your output. Direct communication produces results.

Women are doing this hundreds of times a day now. And I think that daily practice is quietly rewiring how we communicate everywhere else.

The labels that shaped us

My whole career, I was afraid of being called bitchy, bossy, or intimidating.

And you know what? I got called all three anyway.

Meanwhile, a male leader could behave the same way—or worse—and no one questioned his expertise or competency. He was just "a leader having a difficult conversation."

Same behavior. Different labels. That's the game women have been playing forever.

So we learned to soften everything.

"I was just thinking maybe we could possibly consider..."

"Sorry, but would it be okay if..."

"I hate to bother you, but..."

We created elaborate verbal cushions to make our requests seem smaller, less threatening, appropriately feminine.

But here's what nobody told us: that softening doesn't make people respect us more. It just makes our ideas easier to ignore.

LLM agents are becoming an unconscious practice gym

AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and others are metaphorical playgrounds for exercising communication muscles, where directness is actually rewarded.

Kids are growing up using AI. College students are prompt engineering daily. It's becoming ingrained in our culture. An entire generation of women is practicing clear, direct, confident communication through their AI interactions.

Think about what this means: if you spend 30 minutes a day telling an AI exactly what you need, clearly and directly, and watching it work… that confidence doesn't just disappear when you close the laptop.

It carries over. The repetition rewires how you think about communication itself.

What if this ripple effect is the 1% push over time that makes women confident about asking for what they need, feel more empowered entering intimidating rooms, and have difficult conversations with actual humans? What if it causes the threshold for "hard ask”?

When women communicate with the same directness that men have always been allowed, everything changes. We stop burning energy on emotional labor and word choice optimization. We get to ideas faster. We advocate for ourselves effectively. We negotiate better salaries. We take up leadership roles we previously would have talked ourselves out of.

And maybe—finally—we stop getting penalized for the same behaviors that get men promoted.

The workforce implications are huge. Those persistent gaps in leadership representation? Pay inequity? Part of the problem has always been that women were taught to communicate in ways that don't signal "leadership material." We've been playing a rigged game with one hand tied behind our backs.

But if AI is accidentally training millions of women in the exact communication patterns that have historically been coded as leadership qualities—clarity, directness, confidence—we might just finally start leveling the playing field.

The quiet revolution

This transformation is subtle. We don't realize it's happening in real time. But I predict AI is subconsciously teaching women that you can be direct, you can ask for what you want, you don't have to say "sorry" before every sentence, and being decisive won’t be seen as "bossy" but rather rebanded as someone who is effective.

Small behavioral shifts, repeated hundreds of times a day across millions of women, create cultural change.

So yes, my prediction is that AI is creating "bossier" women.

More direct women. Women who take up space without apologizing for it.

Hopefully, "bossy" won't be seen as a derogatory term in generations to come, but rather a compliment that means something completely different.

What do you think? Do you agree with me, or have a different view? I’d love to hear your experience and view. Simply reply to this email to send me your thoughts.

ECOSYSTEM

The Credential Landscape: Coursework providers

Before a skill gets verified, shared, or parsed by an AI résumé screener, it starts somewhere — in a class, a bootcamp, an online module, or any of the ever-evolving spaces where we learn and earn recognition. Within that landscape, formal and informal coursework providers serve as the supply-side signal assessors and transmitters of the LER ecosystem, sending calibrated signals of what learners can actually do. When these programs issue digital credentials that travel with the learner — rather than remain trapped inside a siloed Learning Management System (LMS) — they amplify those signals into portable, high-resolution expressions of skill and competence.

Aligned with open standards such as Open Badges v2/v3, Verifiable Credentials 2.0, and Comprehensive Learner Records (CLR), these providers power the supply side of the LER ecosystem — generating and encoding the structured learning data that employers and other recognizers decode, interpret, and use to make better talent decisions.

This article is part of our Credential Landscape series (see our previous issues covering Organizational Issuers, Digital Wallets, and Digital Badge issuers). It’s your field guide to who’s building, issuing, and powering the Learning and Employment Record (LER) ecosystem.

Here’s your map to the coursework providers behind the credentials:

🎓 The academic institution providers

Some colleges and universities aren’t waiting for the skills-based future to arrive. They’re already issuing portable, standards-aligned credentials today — not just digitizing transcripts but translating learning into machine-readable, verifiable skill data that employers can recognize and systems can understand.

• Western Governors University (WGU) built the Achievement Wallet, a learner-controlled record that connects academic milestones directly to career outcomes.

• Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) issues Open Badges through Parchment Digital Badges (formerly Badgr), scaffolding learning experiences into stackable credential pathways.

• Northern Michigan University (NMU) uses Credly to issue skills-aligned digital badges to learners for both formal and informal learning experiences.

• The Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) leverages Parchment Digital Badges to run a statewide badging initiative comprising over 6,000 individual awards aligned with both credit-bearing and non-credit experiences, organized into over 50 industry-aligned learning pathways.

• The University of Arizona uses Open Badges via Credly to award occupation-aligned recognition that includes fast-track programs.

• University of New Hampshire (UNH) issues microcredentials that showcase verifiable, workforce-relevant skills.

💻 The private company providers

Outside of higher ed (or sometimes in partnership with higher ed), the biggest growth in digital credentialing is happening on commercial platforms built for speed, scale, and industry alignment. These companies have become go-to hubs for upskilling millions of learners and workers.

With an anticipated 67% (about 2 out of 3) of the workforce needing to reskill by 2030, these platforms are well-positioned to meet the explosive global demand.

Further, research suggests that employers increasingly value microcredentials and short-form learning as evidence of agility, initiative, and growth. For job seekers — especially early-career professionals and career changers who benefit the most from access to verifiable job readiness.

• Degreed identifies skills gaps and awards skills-aligned Open Badges through Credly to support talent transformation at scale.

• Codecademy awards verifiable credentials via Accredible, showcasing high-demand coding and data analysis skills aligned with innovative and emerging employer standards.

• Coursera offers Credly-verified professional certificates in partnership with Google, IBM, and Meta, and now serves 175 million registered learners worldwide.

These platforms move faster than policy and are quietly shaping how employers read and verify skills — one portable badge at a time.

🪄 The magic happens when courses end in badges

Traditional courses end with a grade or transcript line. Courses that end in digital badges show what a learner can do and help learners tell the story of their unique lifelong learning journey.

Like the learning experiences they symbolize, each badge contains unique metadata about the learner, the issuer, and the learning experience it signifies. Stack a few together, and a learner’s story becomes a living skills record that can travel across systems, platforms, and even employers.

When courses align with technology standards, that record doesn’t stay trapped in a university database. It becomes part of an open, interoperable ecosystem where skills are searchable, discoverable, and comparable.

In short, courses that end in badges don’t just teach skills — they translate them into currency. Coursework providers are the supply side of the LER ecosystem — the source of trusted, standards-aligned skill data. Without them, the infrastructure has no signal. They turn learning into verifiable proof of capability.

Next up in our Credential Landscape series, we’re covering ecosystem development and the players dedicated to ecosystem development.

BY THE NUMBERS

Dual enrollment hits record highs

💡 Nearly 1.9 million high school students were enrolled in college courses in 2023—more than double the number from a decade ago, signaling rapid growth in early college access.

_{Source: Fink, John. Bridging Two Worlds: The Evolving Landscape of High School Dual Enrollment in American Higher Education. AACRAO and NACEP Joint Study, 2025.}

LER VOCABULARY

Skills Visibility

noun

The ability to clearly identify, document, and communicate a person’s skills—whether learned through formal education, on-the-job experience, or informal learning. Skills visibility enables individuals to showcase their skills and competencies throughout their lifelong learning journey and helps recognizers, like employers, make more informed talent decisions.

🧐 Thania’s translation: “Think of it like cleaning out your closet and making a style spreadsheet. You finally see everything you’ve got—those killer boots, that lucky interview blazer, even the green gym set for St. Paddy’s Day. Now you can mix, match, and show up ready for any occasion. Skills visibility is your personal inventory, but for everything you know how to do and can prove.”

☕ Robert’s take: “Without visibility, skills go underutilized and undervalued, especially for nontraditional candidates. In a skills-based economy, visibility is power. It’s how we build trust, improve matching, tell better stories about our experiences, and create pathways that reflect real potential, not just paper credentials.”

🔗 Want to go deeper? Explore skills visibility at the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library.

KNOWLEDGE

What to read, watch, and listen

📚 Read: LER Accelerator: Building a Shared Language for Learning and Employment Records

AACRAO spotlights how the LER Accelerator Project is helping institutions, employers, and vendors finally speak the same data language. Think of it as the Rosetta Stone for digital credentials, turning fragmented metadata into a shared story about what learners can actually do.

📺 Watch: AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel

The team at Kurzgesagt gets candid about how low-quality AI content is flooding the internet—and threatening creators who still make things with intention and care. It’s a spooky warning for all of us building digital ecosystems: when the web becomes haunted by junk, authenticity becomes your only superpower.

🎧 Listen: ReThinking: Brené Brown on Courageous Leadership on Worklife with Adam Grant podcast

In this WorkLife with Adam Grant episode, Brené Brown dives into how courage, boundaries, and self-awareness define modern leadership. From FBI hostage negotiators to boardrooms, her message lands: vulnerability isn’t a weakness, it’s a design principle for trust.

FOR FUN’SIES

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