A Brief by the Velocity Network Foundation on how the Internet of Careers supports America’s Talent Strategy[1]
Achieving the Golden Age of the American Workforce
The goals of America’s Talent Strategy: Building the Workforce for the Golden Age are predicated on the ability of information to flow seamlessly across the labor market. To realize this vision, workforce data must move efficiently and securely between employers, educators, licensing bodies, government agencies, and technology providers. Organizations require trusted insights into individuals’ skills and credentials to make effective workforce investments, while individuals need mechanisms to present their qualifications in ways that are accurate, verifiable, and widely recognized.
A core challenge lies in ensuring utility for all stakeholders: employers must be able to identify the right talent for the right roles with minimal friction, and workers must be able to access opportunities without unnecessary barriers. By enabling stronger matches between skills and jobs, the labor market becomes both more efficient and more equitable—ensuring that hiring decisions are based on reliable evidence rather than guesswork, and that individuals can connect to opportunities quickly and confidently. This alignment of reliable data, individual empowerment, and market efficiency is essential to building a dynamic labor ecosystem that supports mobility, productivity, and economic growth.
Factoring in the Impacts of AI in the Labor Market
The rise of artificial intelligence introduces new complications to labor market data exchanges. Generative AI tools make it easier than ever for job seekers to create polished resumes and online profiles that appear to perfectly align with job requirements, even when the underlying skills or experiences may not exist. This creates risk for employers, who face growing challenges in distinguishing authentic credentials from fabricated claims, and for workers, whose legitimate achievements may be overshadowed in an increasingly crowded and unreliable data environment.
Verifiable credentials anchored in a trust framework offer a direct solution. By allowing education institutions, licensing bodies, and employers to issue cryptographically secured data records that are portable and tamper-proof, the labor market gains a foundation of reliability. Employers can instantly verify qualifications without lengthy manual checks, and workers can confidently present their achievements knowing they will be recognized as authentic. In this way, verifiable credentials both counteract the risks of AI-enabled fraud and create the conditions for stronger, faster, and more trusted matches across the workforce ecosystem.
Enabling Trusted Data Exchange for Workforce Mobility
The success of modern workforce strategies depends on the development of a unified data layer that allows education, employment, licensure, and skills information to move seamlessly across stakeholders. An open, non-proprietary ecosystem for digital credentials—grounded in a trust framework—enables this exchange by ensuring interoperability, transparency, and user control. Unlike closed or proprietary systems that create silos and limit portability, an open model allows credentials to be issued, stored, and verified across multiple platforms without vendor lock-in. This approach fosters competition, accelerates innovation, and encourages broad adoption across industries and geographies.
The benefits are substantial. First, it enables trusted credential sharing and data exchange, allowing employers to seamlessly receive, verify, and store information for more efficient hiring and talent management. Second, it ensures global interoperability, so that credentials issued in one jurisdiction can be recognized and trusted anywhere across the country, or around the world. Third, it strengthens ownership, security, and ease for individuals, who can curate and share their data with confidence that it will be instantly trusted by institutions and employers. Finally, it supports unlimited exchanges, freeing participants from restrictive vendor contracts and allowing any system or storage application to participate on equal terms.
Together, these capabilities create the foundation for a sustainable, future-proof credentialing ecosystem that advances equity, efficiency, and workforce mobility. The Internet of Careers—commonly referred to as the Velocity Network—provides the open digital infrastructure needed to put these principles into practice, while its rigorous governance model ensures the security and integrity of the ecosystem.
Trusted Career Data will Power America’s Talent Strategy.
| Strategic Pillar | Key Aspects | How Internet of Careers Supports |
| Industry-Driven Strategies | Align workforce programs with employer needs; scale apprenticeships; support employer-led upskilling | Provides free, open infrastructure that allows any organization to issue digitized records of individuals’ skill achievements and to seamlessly receive and verify those records, strengthening workforce pipelines. |
| Worker Mobility | Create career pathways beyond “college-for-all”; enable skill-based advancement; reconnect workers | Enables skills gained across one’s lifetime—through formal education, employer-led training, or other pathways—to be documented, portable, and verifiable, so individuals can demonstrate capabilities for career progression and mobility. |
| Integrated Systems | Break down silos; align federal/state/local agencies; unify worker/employer data and services | Enables the global portability and full interoperability of skills data, increasing efficiency and trust in workforce data exchanges between diverse entities—including employers, educators, agencies, licensing bodies, and workforce platforms. |
| Accountability | Tie funding to measurable outcomes; ensure transparency and ROI in workforce programs | Facilitates the seamless transfer of verifiable and trusted career credentials—including proof of enrollment, training completion, and employment supporting transparency and measurable outcomes for public investments. |
| Flexibility & Innovation | Adapt quickly to new technologies and industries; pilot innovative reskilling and workforce solutions | Industry-agnostic and global by design, allowing labor market data to move seamlessly into emerging technologies, new industries, and innovative workforce solutions as they evolve. |
The Recommended Open Ecosystem Approach
A trust framework–governed, open ecosystem approach to digital credentials ensures interoperability, transparency, and user control, making it a more scalable and equitable solution than closed or proprietary systems. By enabling credentials to be issued, stored, and verified across multiple platforms without vendor lock-in, an open ecosystem fosters competition, innovation, and broad adoption. This model empowers individuals with portable, verifiable credentials that can be used across institutions, employers, and jurisdictions without reliance on a single provider.
In Arkansas…The State of Arkansas is pioneering this approach by motivating its statewide workforce strategy through the use of the Internet of Careers. The initiative directly supports worker mobility by allowing individuals—especially those reentering the workforce or transitioning careers—to seamlessly access and share credentials across platforms, sectors, and geographies.
In Healthcare…HCA Healthcare is leveraging the Internet of Careers to streamline the onboarding of nurses. A recent case study by the Aspen Institute highlights how Cisive, a leading background screening company, is using verifiable credentials to help HCA accelerate placements. With healthcare employers losing an average of $680 per day for every nursing role that remains open, reducing verification and placement time translates directly into cost savings and improved patient care.
In America’s Universities…Other ecosystems across the United States are also advancing this model. Initiatives such as Grand Valley State University’s NextEd CoLab, Dallas College and Texas partners, Miami-Dade College and Florida collaborators, and the Tennessee Board of Regents demonstrate how institutions and states can align with industry to support employer-driven strategies and create flexible, innovative models for credentialing. Once live on the Network, these ecosystems will not only perform the functions outlined in this proposal but also interoperate across states and regions—expanding opportunities for individuals and strengthening the entire labor market.
In the Global Economy…Importantly, these U.S. efforts are connected to emerging ecosystems abroad, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and India, creating true global interoperability. By leveraging the Network, ecosystems instantly benefit from connectivity to HR platforms, job-matching tools, skills identification systems, and upskilling solutions—supporting integration across stakeholders while reinforcing accountability in workforce investments.
Achieving Statewide Mobility…The Network has recently, in partnership with the State of Arkansas and the Strada Education Foundation, launched its “Expanding Statewide Learning Mobility” initiative to develop tools that will guide additional states in adopting the open ecosystem model. As these resources are developed, participating states will be invited to join communities of practice and peer-sharing opportunities to accelerate adoption and replication.
Velocity Network Foundation, the member-led organization governing the Internet of Careers, looks forward to partnering with the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Department of Education to advance mutual objectives.
About Velocity Network Foundation
The Velocity Network Foundation (VNF) is a nonprofit, inclusive membership organization that governs the Internet of Careers—known as the Velocity Network—as a public good infrastructure built on open standards. The Foundation brings together approximately 80 member organizations representing the full spectrum of labor market stakeholders, including employers, educational institutions, HR- and ed-tech vendors, government agencies, staffing firms, and global nonprofits and multilaterals. Members collaborate through a democratic process to advance trusted workforce data exchange. The technology underpinning this infrastructure, the Verii™ tech stack, is open-sourced under the Linux Foundation and is in use within 185 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the Foundation supports hundreds of participating organizations worldwide, all committed to building a secure, interoperable framework for workforce data.
[1] U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Commerce, & U.S. Department of Education. (2025, August 12). America’s talent strategy: Building the workforce for the golden age. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OPA/newsreleases/2025/08/Americas-Talent-Strategy-Building-the-Workforce-for-the-Golden-Age.pdf