Education Design Lab announces grantees for $3.5 million initiative to advance workforce mobility through credential transparency and skills validation

Supported by Walmart, the initiative funds solutions that help working adults navigate a fragmented learn+work ecosystem.

WASHINGTON, April 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Education Design Lab (the Lab), in collaboration with Credential Engine and with support from Walmart, today announced the selection of 10 organizations to receive funding through the Advancing Workforce Mobility initiative. The announcement follows a highly competitive process that drew more than 400 applications from diverse organizations across the country, underscoring the growing demand for solutions that improve how skills and credentials are recognized and used.

The 10 selected organizations represent leading nonprofits and governmental organizations working to make workers' skills and credentials more visible, trusted, and transferable across education and workforce systems, and better connected to real career opportunities.

The selected organizations include:

• Accelerate Montana: Operationalizing Blackfoot Living Principles as open-data workplace competencies in partnership with the Blackfeet Nation, making culturally grounded skills visible to HR systems
• Alternative Mobile Services Association (AMSA): Developing the first national, science-based certification for mobile crisis workers — a growing peer-support workforce with lived experience in behavioral health.
• American Council on Education (ACE): Making skills and credentials more visible, trusted, and portable for over 540,000 military-connected STARs (Skilled Through Alternative Routes). By integrating five national platforms, ACE is developing portable credentials validated by both academic and employer standards, opening doors to new career opportunities.
• Building Skills Partnership: Designing stackable on-the-job training credentials for entry-level janitors in California, connecting skill recognition to promotion pathways through labor-management partnerships.
• Butte County Office of Education — Back 2 Work: Deploying skills capture and credentialing at scale for incarcerated workers in California's Conservation Fire Camps, connecting validated skills to a statewide employer platform and pathways into green-energy careers.
• Center on Rural Innovation (CORI): Piloting a skills validation model co-designed with employers and workers across four rural communities in Vermont, Ohio, Alabama, and Arkansas — embedding performance-based assessment into work-based learning so that skills proven at one employer are recognized by the next.
• Central Pines Regional Council: Researching and prototyping skills-based credentialing frameworks for high-vacancy local government roles in central North Carolina, expanding hiring pathways for STARs in the public sector.
• Institute for Credentialing Excellence: Designing a replicable ecosystem where paid, skills-based micro-internships become employer-validated, portable digital credentials for STARs facing degree barriers.
• Jobs for the Future (JFF): Analyzing Ohio's TechCred program to identify which employer-funded credentials drive wage gains and mobility for STARs, building a replicable model for state workforce investments nationwide.
• Northeastern University: Making the specific technical skills of maritime manufacturing STARs in Connecticut visible, portable, and verifiable through granular, machine-readable digital credentials published to open registries.
   

Each grantee will receive funding ranging from up to $250,000 to $600,000 and will participate in an 18-month cohort experience that includes technical assistance, peer learning, and opportunities to contribute to a shared vision for a more transparent and connected skills ecosystem.

Why it matters

More than 70 million working adults in the United States are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs), having developed valuable skills through community college, military service, work experience, boot camps, or self-directed learning rather than a bachelor's degree. Yet too often, these skills remain difficult to see, verify, or translate across systems — creating barriers to hiring, advancement, and economic mobility.

The Advancing Workforce Mobility initiative addresses these challenges by supporting practical, scalable solutions that improve credential transparency, strengthen quality signals, and enable skills to be more easily understood and used by employers, educators, and workers alike.

"Too many workers have the skills employers need, but lack clear, trusted ways to demonstrate them," said Tara Laughlin, Senior Director of Skills Visibility at Education Design Lab. "These grantees are building solutions that change that — from credentialing the informal expertise of California janitors to making military training legible to civilian employers to professionalizing an entirely new first-responder workforce. This is what it looks like to move from talking about skills-based hiring to actually building the infrastructure for it."

"This initiative is about creating real-world examples the field can learn from and build on," said Monique Carswell, Director of Opportunity at Walmart. "Across the country, workers have built valuable skills through experience, service, and community. By improving how those skills and credentials are described, validated, and shared, these projects can open new pathways to opportunity and economic mobility, especially for STARs."

"This amazing cohort is proof that credential transparency and skills validation work, because these organizations are already making skills visible and turning them into real career opportunities," said Deb Everhart, Chief Strategy Officer at Credential Engine. "We're excited to support this cohort as they evolve and scale up these solutions, providing models and infrastructure that advance opportunities for STARs across the country."

Lisa Larson, CEO of Education Design Lab, added: "This work is about moving from conversation to implementation — supporting solutions that make skills visible, portable, and valued in the labor market."

What's next

Over the next 18 months, grantees will design, test, and scale solutions that:

• Make skills visible — from culturally grounded competencies in the Blackfeet Nation to technical trade skills in a Connecticut shipyard;
• Build employer trust in non-degree credentials — through co-designed validation, performance-based assessment, and dual academic-employer review;
• Connect credential data across systems using open standards —  enabling skills information to move with workers across employers, regions, and sectors; and
• Generate shared learning about what works — and for whom — so that insights from this cohort can inform the broader field.

Projects span a range of approaches and readiness levels, contributing to a broader ecosystem vision where skills and credentials can be more easily compared, trusted, and applied across systems.

Building a more transparent skills ecosystem

A defining feature of the initiative is its focus on collective learning and ecosystem impact. The 10 grantees form a national learning cohort that spans tribal communities, rural towns, urban centers, military communities, and state workforce systems. They serve STARs who are veterans, justice-impacted individuals, immigrant workers, indigenous community members, rural workers, and mobile crisis responders.

By investing in this diversity of approaches, populations, and geographies, the initiative aims to test whether common infrastructure — open data standards, employer co-design, performance-based validation — can work across fundamentally different contexts, generating evidence and models the field can build on.

About Philanthropy at Walmart

Walmart.org represents the philanthropic efforts of Walmart and the Walmart Foundation. By focusing where the business has unique strengths, Walmart.org works to tackle key social and environmental issues and collaborate with others to spark long-lasting systemic change. Walmart has stores in 19 countries, employs approximately 2.1 million associates and does business with thousands of suppliers who, in turn, employ millions of people. Walmart.org is helping people live better by supporting programs to accelerate upward job mobility for frontline workers, address hunger, build economic opportunity for people in supply chains, protect and restore nature, reduce waste and emissions, and build strong communities where Walmart operates. To learn more, visit www.walmart.org.

About Credential Engine

Credential Engine is a nonprofit whose mission is to map the credential and skills landscape with clear information, fueling the creation of resources that empower people to discover and pursue the learning and career pathways that are best for them. Credential Engine provides a suite of web-based services, including an open Credential Registry to house up-to-date information about all credentials and skills, the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL), a common description language to enable credential comparability, and a platform to support customized applications to search and retrieve information about credentials and skills. Learn more: credentialengine.org

About Education Design Lab

Education Design Lab (the Lab) is a national nonprofit and intermediary with a mission to co-design an inclusive, skills-based learn-and-work system that facilitates upward economic mobility and closes opportunity gaps for the New Majority Learner-Earner. Our facilitated design process helps employer and education stakeholder groups co-design and launch scalable, skills-based education-to-work pathways that align talent supply and demand. Learn more: www.eddesignlab.org

SOURCE Education Design Lab