Takeaways from CAEL’s Keynote Session with Acting Assistant Secretary Nick Moore

Nick Moore, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE), joined Rachel Hirsch, CAEL vice president of public partnerships, in a fireside chat, kicking off day two of Connecting the Dots: The Education to Employment Loop¸ CAEL’s two-day virtual convening held this week. The keynote conversation covered key topics connected to interagency agreements between the Departments of Education and Labor, Workforce Pell, and other issues important to the CAEL community.Moore described the integration of the DOL’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) with ED’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) as an effort to create a consolidated “department of talent” empowering states to take a greater role in tackling challenges he outlined during the event.

He noted that 70% of jobs over the next decade will require some form of “postsecondary learning of quality,” from microcredentials to advanced degrees. While credential completion is a critical issue, “We need to know how to call balls and strikes on those programs and make sure that we're not training people into poverty or selling people wooden nickels in terms of non-degree credentials,” Moore said.

He called for addressing the completion challenge concurrently with deteriorating labor force participation rates, a strategy he hopes governors and others closest to problem points will be better positioned to pursue under the interagency operating model.

Moore highlighted several revised processes he says the model is streamlining, including aligned timelines for submitting WIOA and Perkins plans, integrated review processes that previously involved potentially contradictory feedback from different departments, and a simplified process for shifting Perkins plans to the WIOA portal.

He predicts these changes will double the number of states submitting combined WIOA and Perkins plans. Doing so, he added, will allow states to better identify credentials of value aligned to in-demand jobs as well as keep credentials updated with skills data. “That's where the magic can really happen to unlock things like credit for prior learning and unbundling and modularizing degrees.”

As these advantages come to fruition, Moore believes they will create significant benefits for navigating Workforce Pell and other programs, including Medicaid and SNAP, which will require administrative data to meet new work requirements.

Moore reminded the audience that Workforce Pell isn’t a vehicle for additional funding, acknowledging that it will stimulate greater demand for the Pell Grant program, which is already underfunded. Still, he pointed to the relatively modest comment count (about 400) accrued during the public comment period as an indication that the legislation is close to what stakeholders are hoping for.

Given vagueness present in the statute, Moore predicted that successfully managing Workforce Pell will come down to states’ ability to authoritatively define what a high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand occupation means in their sectors. “Looking at your true LMI needs to be the north star on that,” he said.

Defining a credential of value and ensuring non-degree credential quality and transparency will also be critical, said Moore. He argued the importance of talent marketplaces with technology arrays that can assimilate credential outcomes and skills data in one clearinghouse.

Such an approach elevates a credential registry from a static “phone book” listing to a database that links credentials to competencies and the broader workforce ecosystem, Moore argued: “When somebody earns a credential, whether it's a Ph.D. or a six-week welding certification, how do they make transparent and portable those skills across state lines so that these systems interoperate?”

Moore stressed that displacing credentials is not the objective of skills-based hiring. Instead, he described it as an attempt to connect formalized and informal learning. Despite this effort, which began in earnest in the unique employment landscape forged by the pandemic, the rhetoric around skills-based hiring hasn’t yet matched reality. However, he believes it has created a “now or never” opportunity to level the playing field for job seekers while benefitting educators and employers.

Traditionally, high-quality jobs are less accessible through job boards, more likely to be discovered through word-of-mouth and other non-tangible factors, Moore said. With AI tools, we now have the potential to build out talent marketplaces as a new national public data utility that captures a discrete system of competencies, connects them to jobs, and also serves as a signaling mechanism between the supply and the demand side.

Under such a holistic arrangement, institutions will enjoy better clarity about which programs will create value for learners and employers, with transcripts becoming reliable vehicles of competencies as well as credentials, Moore said.

He believes digitally driven competency mobility can make CPL a more seamless process as well. “We need to be able to leverage talent marketplaces to assert that credit at the point of intake, and for there to be minimal steps that somebody needs to take to unlock that, and then also to make our one-stop centers and community colleges credit for prior learning assessment factories,” he said.

That, he reminded attendees, would also offer enrollment advantages. If college recruiters are focusing on adult learners as fewer high school graduates become available to them, “Credit for prior learning is probably one of the best ways to do that,” said Moore.

Cross-trained career navigators who can help adult learners glean pathways to self sufficiency amid administrative complexity are also critical, said Moore. Such guidance can be the difference between seeing a productive way out of poverty traps and remaining immobilized by self-reinforcing obstacles.

Perhaps the clearest message that emerged during the session was the urgency of proactively designing training programs with employers that include work-based learning components and job-relevant skills rather than trying to react to Workforce Pell requirements.

It’s a task that members of CAEL should be well prepared to do. Moore praised the organization’s role in championing experiential learning, harmonizing degree and non-degree programs, and allowing people to validate lived experience in a way that rises above theory to put policy into practice.

Registrants of the virtual convening can listen to the complete replay of this keynote and other sessions at the attendee hub.