The Personal (Digital) Education and Employment Record (PDEER)
People should have their own digital record of the education and their employment that they control and which works on their behalf - for life.
I’ve heard arguments for many different aspects of life as being ‘the start point’ for genuine personal data empowerment.
Some think financial services, some health and wellbeing, some advertising and offers. A case can be made for almost any start point. And they are all valid - if one either has a large organisation willing and able to kick-start the ecosystem. Or there is a sufficiently large body of people with sufficient pain around current methods that they will try something new.
There are currently efforts underway on many of these, in multiple geographies. Sometime soon, I think one of them will catch fire.
My own current favourite, based on a lot of evidence gathered over the last few months, is that people should have their own digital record of their education and employment. When you think about that, it makes perfect sense. We already have the concept of the Curriculum Vitae, our CV. That’s currently assumed to be a bit of paper; or a document with multiple versions that can be sent by email, or uploaded. But it does not have to be. If it were a smart, accessible data record controlled by the individual then it would be so much more useful. That makes sense in isolation, and also then as a building block for personal data management tools across other parts of live.
So what might that look like; and what can it do? We’ve built a prototype within DataPal to help understand that; it’s called Learning 2 Work in that it covers education and all that entails; the transition to employment, and then the ongoing learning through work experiences and skills development. So a living record, with verification where useful; and the ability to then present different views onto it for different purposes.
The start point is that individuals must have a digital place of their own that they control, or one that is run for them by a service provider acting on a fiduciary basis for them. In my case that would be DataPal, but it could be any data service that is fiduciary to the individual.
A CV upload or re-entry could be a start point for people; or people could just create these records from scratch. Better still, verified records of institutions attended, qualfications attained and work roles could be pushed in or made available to the data service by the source.
Formats vary slightly country to country, but as LinkedIn illustrates, it is possible to come up with a standard approach that works for the vast majority of scenarios in which this data is being shared or otherwise used.
So how does an individual benefit from this model? I think there are a number of significant areas:
Having one record controlled by the individual, places the data with the person who gains most from it being accurate and a good representation of themselves.
When the individual controls the record, they also control who and what else can access it, and on what basis. As education and employment related records are shared many times over then making this work well is key.
Record components can be verified at source (school, college, university, employer, online learning provider), and shared onwards without loss of integrity.
The individual can connect their record to other useful services, e.g. course suggester, job finder, CV tuner agent
The visual below is our start point. It shows a number of data sources representing different periods of education and/ or employment being ingested in a personal data store/ service, and then formatted in a consistent way. These standardised templates are then available for AI agents, orgamisation connections, applications and data services to augment and interact with.
From the individual perspective this, in many ways, just re-constitutes that which they already know. The big difference is that all of this data is now under their control; and it’s alive - constantly being updated. That’s a big underlying shift from the current mode is which data about a person mainly just sits in some organisation system as a static record.
The real power in this more dynamic approach, I believe, emerges around career development. That combination of where and who I am, what I know, what I enjoy, my past experiences and qualifications is working on my behalf. It can:
Help young people understand and engage with their learning and career choices
Support them in college/ university application processes
Flag up and source new things people may wish to learn about that will match thier interests and help their careers
Enable people to prove their learning and qualification history by having their records verified by the relevant institutions
Help them apply for new roles within their existing organisations, or externally - and retain records of who has accessed their records, and for what purposes
Enable feedback to be turned into more learning experiences
There are wider societal benefits that will emerge when we upgrade academic and employment records and the statistics that emerge from them. We will collectively have a better lens onto skills being developed and how that lines up with skills being made available and acquired. In this rapidly changing, AI-fuelled world that will be an important capability.
Then, a further set of opportunities that emerge in areas adjacent to learning and employment. Financial services such as pensions, life assurance and private healthcare benefit from richer, portable human-centric data. Taxation and related processes will improve, as will the administration of public benefits.
But the best thing about this new model is that it will cost very little to get up and running; and there are no big dependencies to be addressed in advance of standing up such a service. Just like our own CV’s, we make these records ourselves. If others then wish to connect their aspects of the learning and work related records then great - they get to share in the benefits as well. It may also be that one can easily get this up and running at scale leveraging people’s existing LinkedIn profiles and the data portability API’s from that service (and then others).
I’ll be talking more on this at the MyData Global conference this week; so will follow up on this post when there is a prototype service planned to engage with.
And as a bonus, here’s an enlarged version of that illustration of one lens onto a PDEER.
This article was also published on SubStack by Iain Henderson.