1. Jim Farmer instructional media + magic, inc.
Students and Employers: Communicating Competencies HR Open Standards Annual Conference 2016 The Woodlands, Texas March 2016
Jim Farmer
instructional media + magic, inc.

2. And now after 15 years, Higher Education is responding to HR Open Standards (then HR-XML Consortium) request for a discussion of competencies and their use by employers.

3. Definitions
Competency: “A learnable, measurable [and/or observable], role-relevant, and behavior-based characteristic or capability of an individual ”
Lumina Foundation.2015.Connecting Credentials:
A Beta Credentials Framework
An ability or skill
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
A competency is commonly described as what an individual “can do.” If an individual can demonstrate a given competency, it means that the individual possesses the knowledge, skills, and abilities to do a certain “job.”
American Council on Education.2016.Communicating
the value of Competencies or
“task.” Competency
is more
valuable
when it
is not
simply the
ability

4. Why Are Competencies Important Now?
U.S. Department of Education
College Scorecard
Salary is a now a carefully watched institutional metric

5. To support universities’ need for improving employment metrics of graduates, employers can now require job application data to be provided using HR-Open Standards.

6. The Players
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sponsor the American Council on Education’s basic research on credentials and competencies.
Lumina Foundation is sponsoring a series of pilot projects. These include:
Experiential Transcript – Elon University and Loma Linda University
Transfer Credit Evaluation – Lexmark
eTranscript Credential – University of Maryland, University College
UK Joint Information Systems Committee
XCRI development and implementations

7. The Players
USA Funds supporting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation“ addressing the skills gap facing America’s business community,” “to improve government-supported quality assurance systems over time” and “The Talent Pipeline Management initiative.”
Changing the Debate (Draft), 27 January 2016

8. Benefits for Employers
Rejection or Selection of Applications
When the volume is large, automation can accurately identify potential hires. More substantive text for algorithms than resume keywords.
Support for Interviewers
Create a briefing document identifying relevant course work (subject codes) and experiences supplementing this with catalog course descriptions.
Support Talent Search
Identify students who have taken a desired “group of courses.”
Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University

9. Syllabi: information faculty author
“The main syllabus components are (a) course catalog description (course title/number, department, audience, delivery method, units/sessions/hours, topics, goals/objectives, prerequisites, and rationale), (b) expected outcomes (goals and learning objectives), (c) description of content (session-by-session overview of the subject matter), (d) course requirements, (e) course grading system (point-based, if possible), (f) resources/tools available to the participants (textbook, software, hardware, bibliography/webliography), and (g) detailed course schedule (with session dates, specific assignments, and due dates).”
From
Experiential Transcript – Elon University
Experience Transcript – Loma Linda University
Transfer Credit Evaluation – Lexmark

10. The British Are Providing
Colleges and universities to provide public information on institutions, programs, and courses online for prospective students, the institutions themselves, and employers.
The earliest results show improvements in student satisfaction and engagement, retention, and increased enrollments.
“This evolutionary process began with Unistats: “the official website for comparing UK higher education course data.”
From unistats.direct.gov.uk/
Manchester Metropolitan University was an early adopter. CETIS provides IT expertise. University of Cambridge offers next step.

11. The UK HEAR Higher Education Achievement Report includes
1. Personal information about the student
2. Name of the qualification gained
3. Level of qualification gained.
4. Detailed contents and results gained, mode of student, programme requirements, details of all components of the final mark or grade.
5. Function of the qualification – access to further study and level, and professional status.
6. Additional awards, recognized activities and university, professional and departmental prizes.
7. Formal authentication of the HEAR
8. Weblink reference to a description of the higher education system.

12. Some IT development suggestions
Standards for extended transcripts
Implement the XCRI course data exchange using PESC and BSI standards
Add discipline codes (BLS SOC, CIP, JACS) for analysis
Cliff Adelman: Use experience from “The Diploma Supplement” of the Bologna Process (implemented/implementing by 46 countries) [Coordinate with NAFSA and NACAC]
Add “Standard” competencies
Lumina Foundation pilots, Gates Foundation basic research [ACE, Georgetown University]

13. Some Some IT early implementation suggestions
Develop standards for data exchange of course and student.
Begin with annotated electronic transcripts
Instructional program codes [added course data elements to current PESC transcript]
Provide online public course catalogs for employers using XCRI/HR-XML API.
Automate course description look up for interviewers
Support transcript analysis for “groups of courses”
Support resume, course description, position description automated analyses

14. Colleges and universities should
Implement employer access via APIs
Transcripts and limited HEAR and Diploma supplements with CIP (US) and/or JACS (UK) discipline codes via the XCRI APIs first using national data standards. (PESC transcripts in the US).
Online course catalogs using PESC standard
From the Lumina projects develop XCRI standard data packages, based on PESC standards, for competencies (e.g. University of Maryland University College and Elon University’s learning experiences).

15. Jim Farmer JXF [at] immagic . com
The End
Jim Farmer
JXF [at] immagic . com

16. Notes
To accommodate additional presentations in the HR New Trends and Projects session only a summary of this presentation was given.
Subsequent to the conference slides 12, 13 and 14 were added to document discussions about how the work of colleges and universities on transcripts could be extended and implemented for employers.

17. References
Unistats is a subject indexed course descriptions website with associated qualification, location and study mode. Unistats has been implemented in the UK using the XCRI API. The URL of the website itself is unistats.direct.gov.uk