⬇️ Inside this issue:

• Thania explains the invisible work of women in the workplace

• Learn about the digital wallet providers in the ecosystem

• How to support neurodivergent employees better

INTERESTING READS

🎓 Career credentials are booming in high schools, but not all hold real value.

🌍 From Ukraine to the U.S., see how online courses are powering global career mobility.

🏥 Career ladders in healthcare may be the smartest investment hospitals can make right now.

💰 Here’s what the government shutdown could mean for higher ed and student aid.

LEADERSHIP

The invisible work you’re not paying women to do

Who bought the birthday cake at your office? Who takes meeting notes? Who orders supplies? If you're picturing a woman, that's the problem.

This is "invisible work," labor that goes unrecognized and uncompensated. Women receive 44% more requests for non-promotable tasks than men and say yes 76% of the time (compared to men's 51%).

The work gets done, culture thrives, but the people doing it burn out and get passed over for promotions.

I lived this firsthand as VP of Marketing at a startup. I was responsible for our brand, which meant everything about how the company felt. The aesthetic when you walked in, the vibe at company events, the visual identity on our business cards. That was my domain, and I loved it.

So naturally, I was the one ordering supplies, planning birthdays, organizing happy hours, coordinating team morale events, right?

The supply closet's a mess? I'll handle it. Kitchen disaster before a social media photo? I'll clean it up.

These things affected the brand and culture I was building, so of course, they were mine to manage. Except here's the thing: I didn't realize how much I'd taken on until I was already doing it all. Yes, I owned the vision. But a lot of these tasks weren't actually marketing responsibilities; I had just made them mine by not speaking up. Eventually, I suggested we hire a facilities manager because I was struggling to balance my actual marketing strategy with serving as the unofficial office manager.

But what really got me was what happened in my performance reviews. I joined the 88% of high-performing women who get critiqued on their personalities, receiving feedback that they’re "too intimidating" to junior staff. Meanwhile, my actual marketing work—those acquisition targets I was crushing—got minimal acknowledgment. And all those invisible tasks? Not mentioned at all.

As the only woman on the leadership team, I also became the default advocate for women's issues: shaping our maternity leave policy, driving equity initiatives, leading DEI efforts. I was proud of that work. But it was never my job—it was HR's. And it never appeared in my reviews either. How cool would it have been if I'd earned an HR or organizational leadership badge for all that labor?

The real cost of invisible labor

A 2022 study found that women do more invisible work than men, regardless of occupation or managerial position.

The assumption baked into workplace culture is that women are just "naturally" good at coordination, team dynamics, and administrative tasks.

But calling these skills "natural" devalues them entirely. When we assume women inherently know how to manage social dynamics or anticipate needs, we strip away the recognition that these require actual effort, emotional intelligence, and time.

Midsize S&P 500 companies lose about $282 million annually to disengagement and attrition from this dynamic. The cherry on top is when women perform this office housework, they face penalties like worse performance evaluations and fewer promotion recommendations, but when men do it, they’re rewarded because they're seen as going "above and beyond."

Only about a quarter of companies formally recognize this work, even though almost 70% say diversity and inclusion work is "extremely critical."

Start making invisible work visible

Here’s what organizations can do right now: award granular, skills-aligned badges that recognize the full range of competencies their employees demonstrate—including coordination, emotional intelligence, and culture-building abilities that too often go unnoticed and unrewarded.

Write skills-based job descriptions that force clarity about what roles actually entail. When you clearly define positions, you'll notice when someone starts absorbing invisible tasks beyond the scope of their role. Better yet, create an actual role for that coordination work once you've mapped your organization's real needs.

Document and credential skills like team coordination, conflict mediation, and cultural stewardship through verifiable credentials. Stop treating these as "women's work" and start treating them as enduring, professional competencies (sometimes called “soft skills”) worthy of recognition and compensation.

This is what the Learning and Employment Records (LER) ecosystem enables. Skills-based systems won't solve workplace gender dynamics overnight. But by making invisible work visible, measurable, and compensable, we take a real step toward equity. And in a world obsessed with talent shortages and retention challenges, recognizing all the work people actually do seems like a pretty smart place to start.

TOP SECRET

A community for skills-based professionals

Here’s the scoop. We’re looking to expand our newsletter.

We’re dreaming up more: webinars, tutorials, live Q&As, maybe even a community space to connect with others navigating the world of skills-based hiring and learning records.

Before we build anything, we need your take.

We’ve got a few ideas brewing (some are ✨ pretty cool ✨), but we want to make sure we’re creating something that actually helps you do your job better.

It’s 8 quick questions.

👉 Take the survey (pretty please).

Thanks for helping shape what comes next. We’re building this with (and for) you.

ECOSYSTEM

The Credential Landscape: Digital wallets

If digital badges are the new diplomas, digital wallets are the backpacks they live in. They’re where learners stash, share, and show off their verified skills—ideally in a way that’s portable across jobs, schools, and life. The problem? Not all wallets are created equal. Some are open and interoperable; others are built for specific institutions or ecosystems. And while everyone’s chasing “learner-owned,” the definitions are still... fluid.

This article is part of our Credential Landscape series (we previously covered organizational issuers and digital badges). It’s your cheat sheet to the LER ecosystem, minus the buzzwords and vendor pitches. Here’s the lay of the land for digital wallets—the keepers of our skills:

🕊️ Wallets Built for Portability and Independence

These wallets prioritize learner and worker autonomy, enabling individuals to securely own, manage, and share verified records across institutions, platforms, and borders without vendor lock-in or centralized control.

• Velocity (Career Wallet) is a blockchain-powered passport for professional data, giving workers control over their verified career records.

• Veres champions open-source, decentralized identity infrastructure—basically, the plumbing behind verifiable credentials.

• Greenlight (not to be confused with the debit card app) lets students own their verified learning records; already live in several state pilot programs.

• Indicio provides the infrastructure that makes SSI (self-sovereign identity) actually work in the wild, powering wallets and credential networks across sectors.

🎓 Wallets Designed for Institutional and Workforce Integration

Developed and deployed by schools, states, and employers, these wallets serve as trusted credential hubs, bringing together transcripts, badges, and verified records within coordinated ecosystems that connect learning to employment.

• ASU Pocket lets learners collect and share credentials from Arizona State’s massive ecosystem. Think digital campus ID, career passport, and showcase in one.

• SchooLinks brings badges to the K–12 crowd, helping students store and share achievements aligned with state CCR frameworks.

• Alabama Talent Triad is a statewide digital wallet designed to connect learning, credentials, and employment within a single ecosystem.

• Indiana Achievement Wallet is equity-focused, aiming to give learners in marginalized communities ownership over their verified skills and achievements.

• ScoutPass (powered by LearnCard) bridges education and hiring, helping Scout candidates showcase verified competencies directly to employers.

• BCSI supports the complete skills-based learning, recognition, and hiring lifecycle for learners and workers in the bioscience sector by implementing a technology stack that includes credential awards, a wallet, a validation hub for bioscience skills, and a talent marketplace powered by SmartResume.

• TrueCred builds learner-controlled wallets for workforce programs and credentials, often white-labeled for regional initiatives.

• The Learner Credential Wallet is an open-source mobile wallet developed by the Digital Credentials Consortium, a network of leading international universities designing an open infrastructure for academic credentials.

⚙️ Wallet Infrastructure Powering the Ecosystem

These solutions provide the underlying infrastructure and interoperability standards that enable digital credentialing, supporting issuance, verification, and data portability across the Learning and Employment Record (LER) landscape.

• iQ4 integrates digital credential wallets into talent pipelines, linking skills with real job pathways - We especially love the way their platform unpacks and frames valuable skills!

• EBSCOed extends its education data footprint into LER wallets, connecting credentials across institutions.

• SpruceID provides open-source decentralized identity infrastructure for developers, enabling the creation and verification of digital wallets and credentials. Its technology already underpins several verifiable credential pilots and interoperability initiatives.

• Accredible, Instructure, Territorium, Credly, POK, and Sertifier all now offer wallet-enabled experiences, expanding their credentialing tools to include learner-controlled records.

Digital wallets are rapidly emerging as the modern résumé. The challenge will be ensuring these systems can actually communicate with one another and key stakeholders (like institutions and employers) in a trusted, verifiable way. The good news: every wallet (or wallet-enabled ecosystem) featured here is built on open standards designed to make that possible. Until interoperability becomes the norm, though, learners will continue juggling logins and links instead of carrying a single, trusted record of what they know and can do.

Next up in our Credential Landscape series is coursework providers. These are the companies that help provide a platform and process that result in a digital badge.

And… if you still haven’t had time, could we ask you again to take our survey?
👉 Click to take our survey (pretty please).

Editor’s note:

In our initial publication of this Skills Scoop edition, we incorrectly described Pocket as being developed or powered by 1EdTech.

Pocket is an application created by Arizona State University (ASU) and is not powered or operated by 1EdTech. While ASU’s approach aligns with open standards and interoperability principles that 1EdTech's community develops and promotes, the two entities are separate and unaffiliated in the development or governance of the Pocket app.

At Skills Scoop, accuracy and integrity matter deeply to us. If you spot an error, nuance, or clarification worth surfacing, we’d love to hear from you—your input helps us keep this publication as sharp, credible, and useful as possible. You can reach our editorial team directly at [email protected]

BY THE NUMBERS

Microcredentials get you a raise

💡 90% of employers say they’d offer 10–15% higher starting salaries to candidates with microcredentials.

_{Source: Coursera Microcredentials Report, 2025}

KNOWLEDGE

🍂 What to read, watch, and listen

📚 Read: Are microcredentials the future of education?, Article by Masslive.com

Short-term credential programs aren’t just experiments anymore; they’re reshaping higher ed. This piece captures how colleges are responding to learner demand for faster, cheaper, skill-driven pathways and why microcredentials are becoming central to proving value in education.

📺 Watch: How to support neurodivergent employees better as a leader via TikTok

Beth Radulski breaks down how traditional leadership habits (ie, micromanagement, bias toward conformity, lack of accommodations) can unintentionally exclude neurodivergent staff. A must-watch for any leader serious about building truly inclusive teams.

🎧 Listen: Breast cancer survivor discusses leadership principles in the face of trauma on Bridge The Gap Podcast

Author and survivor Natalie Zeleznikar shares what resilience looks like at the executive level, turning personal adversity into leadership insight in The Scars You Can’t See. A moving reminder that empathy is a strategy.

FOR FUN’SIES

Now that you made it to the end. Can we remind you to take the survey? 🙂 
Click here to take our survey and give us your thoughts.

💌 Have more feedback? Reply to this email and tell us. We read each one.

🗣️ Want to be featured as a contributor? We’re looking for industry experts to write editorials.