Velocity Network Foundation (VNF) is delighted to share its key updates with the broader credentialing ecosystem and openly invite your feedback and participation in our exciting work.
Below are the golden nuggets of “what you may have missed” as we work as a membership coalition to transform career credentials into digitized records that can be trusted, secure, private, compliant, and globally mobile.
As you read, please remember that we are a trust framework, offering career credentials governance, developed and led by our contributing members.
Together, we empower the global labor market with our free/open-source technology that can be used by any vendor, credentialing platform, digital wallet, institution, employer, government, etc. to participate in our global network for career credentials.
Again, we welcome you to join us! Build on your own leveraging our robust documentation, or formally join as a Member and influence the Network’s collective direction.
Hope to work with you soon.
*In this Summary: New Members: Arkansas, Digital Promise, 1EdTech, REC; Adoption Updates: US Healthcare, European Banking, India IT Services, Global Education; Product Updates: Trust, Digital Wallets, Data Schemas (Nursing License, CLR), PDF Attachments.
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Summer 2024 – What to Know
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Welcome New Members
Welcome… Arkansas, our first VNF State Member! As seen online, this spring, Governor Sanders announced the launch of the Arkansas Workforce Strategy. The skills-centric approach will be supported with timely, interoperable data for a more integrated and agile workforce system and improved digital customer experience. The inclusion of digital career credentials using Velocity Network infrastructure will provide individuals with a comprehensive digital record of their skills and experience (however attained), empowering them for better career opportunities. An amazing group of professionals from government, associations, employers, institutions, and other workforce organizations met in May to workshop solution initial uses cases for Healthcare Sector and Corrections Department populations, producing this summary video and extensive plans for the road ahead. Thank you to Mike Rogers, Arkansas Chief Workforce Officer, for exceptional vision and leadership, and to the entire ARData team who will guide execution across the state. We look forward to connecting this important state work to additional Velocity members, builders, and ecosystems that are engaged in relevant career credentialing efforts.
And in Recruitment industry, we are also excited to welcome… the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) as one of Velocity’s most recent members. The REC is the voice of the recruitment industry in the United Kingdom. The REC is spearheading its membership community of 3,000 staffing companies towards a shared initiative to reduce friction, time and cost, utilizing the Velocity Network to leverage verifiable digital credentials.
A Warm Welcome to… 1EdTech, new Member and Partner! 1EdTech® is a united global community committed to powering learner potential through an open, trusted, and innovative education technology and digital credentials ecosystem that serves the lifelong needs of every learner. As a part of this new partnership, a 1EdTech representative will join the Velocity Network Foundation Advisory Board, and the Velocity Network Foundation Credential Agent will undergo 1EdTech Certification. The VNF Community looks forward to working closely with 1EdTech to advance their mutual mission of empowering learners with their own career data. The standards and EdTech sector expertise of 1EdTech and the Trust Network and governance of VNF will create a winning combination for the digital credentialing ecosystem.
Velocity embraces equity as it welcomes… New Member, Digital Promise! Digital Promise is a global nonprofit working to expand opportunity for each learner; its mission is to shape the future of learning and advance equitable education systems by bringing together solutions across research, practice, and technology. A featured project is the organization’s work with micro-credentialing, including a newly developing multi-partner initiative to make the issuing of verifiable digital credentials more widely accessible to organizations. The Digital Promise team looks forward to working with Velocity Network members to build the future of career credentials, and their experience with solving for equity will have a powerful influence on the direction of Velocity Network Foundation.
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Adoption Updates
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In US Healthcare… PreCheck (Cisive) and HCA Healthcare Expand Issuing to North Texas. PreCheck has been offering verifiable credentials of past employment and education to HCA Healthcare’s new hires in Florida for over a year; this spring, PreCheck and HCA expanded this offering to the HCA division of North Texas. Going forward, every new hire for HCA Healthcare in the North Texas Division who completes a background screening process with PreCheck will be offered the opportunity to claim their relevant career credentials as trusted, reusable, verifiable digital credentials. So far, approximately 30,000 individuals have been offered career credentials through this process and almost 80% of individuals express interest in receiving them.
Velocity Network Foundation recently partnered with flagship Employer HCA Healthcare to host an event to showcase the use of verifiable credentials to generate efficiencies in HR processes and ultimately improve patient care. Congratulations to PreCheck and HCA on pioneering healthcare transformation!
Also in US Healthcare… Velocity Healthcare Cluster says ONWARD! VNF Member organizations joined together to form the SkillsONWARD project in the Florida and Texas ecosystems. Over 20 Velocity Network Foundation members are teaming up to accelerate adoption of instantly verifiable digital credentials within the healthcare sectors of Florida and Texas. The goal is to address challenges posed by staffing shortages, employee turnover, and delayed onboarding processes—with the ultimate goals of increasing efficiencies in HR processes and enhancing patient care. SkillsONWARD is a focused 18-month program designed to collaboratively achieve a self-sufficient ‘Atomic Network’ in Healthcare in Florida and Texas. Participating members include: AMN Healthcare, CGFNS, Cisive, Credential Engine, Dataflow Group, Employ, HCA Healthcare, Infor, Intelicampus (Beyond Academics), Korn Ferry, MedEd Cloud, Medicus Healthcare Solutions, NCSBN, Randstad, Sertifier, SHRM, Upskill America (Aspen Institute), Velocity Career Labs, Velocity Network Foundation, and Vetty.
In the Netherlands… Randstad and Rabobank Pioneer Verifiable Credentials! Randstad and Rabobank are pioneering new ways of screening talent using verifiable credentials in partnership with the Velocity Network Foundation. Emerging technologies are shaving days, if not weeks, from the background, credential, education, and employment verification process. This is possible by giving candidates individual control and agency over their career information in a way that is trusted and verifiable. Randstad and Rabobank are already inviting candidates and companies alike to be a part of the movement. They are convinced that verifiable credentials ensure rapid, compliant hiring, reducing the time and cost of placing employees into the right roles. It benefits them, and many others, to move in this direction. The more companies, candidates, credentialing bodies and academic institutions that participate, the faster we can process background checks, getting more qualified candidates into meaningful roles. A Spring event was held featuring Marc Jansen, Head of People Data, Innovation, and Strategy, and Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Rabobank, Joke de Groot, Director HR Talent & Professionals at Randstad Groep Nederland in Amsterdam with standing room only.
In India… Aon Issues CoCubes Assessment Results in India! In June, Aon offered the first batch of what will be 1.5 million credentials to 150,000 students who have completed CoCubes Assessments. Aon is offering each student all their CoCubes scores as well as badges attesting to their suitability for various job roles based on those results. This is largely to mediate a complex landscape present in India, where there are so many schools and there are so many different results from the education programs of those schools, that an assessment is required to communicate—in addition to formal education credentials—the technology skill level of those graduates. The assessment score combined with the degree credentials can be used by employers to instantly verify, quickly hire, and efficiently onboard. Congratulations to the Aon team for achieving this important milestone as a critical example of how assessment credentials issued in a secure, trusted, complaint way can ease friction in the hiring market, going beyond the narrow view of traditional educational credentials as the priority credentials to issue. We look forward to engaging prospective members with this dynamic and fast-moving technology ecosystem!
Also in India… Neeyamo Trailblazes the Use of Velocity in India! Early this Spring, Neeyamo announced that it will make use of Velocity’s universal verification platform to verify education and career credentials globally with an initial focus on the Indian IT services ecosystem. As Neeyamo Chairman Ashok Bildikar said: “Embracing blockchain technology in the realm of careers, we’re not just innovating; we’re revolutionizing the very fabric of professional connectivity. Through our pioneering approach, we’re empowering individuals to navigate their career paths with unparalleled transparency, security, and efficiency. We always endeavour to deliver our clients the fastest and most reliable solutions possible. Harnessing the latest blockchain technology through the ‘Internet of Careers’, allows us to do just that.” To view of demo of the universal verification platform, please click here.
In Global Education… VNF Ed Cluster initiates additional ecosystems! The VNF Education Cluster Adoption Team (EDCAT) is a dynamic offshoot of the VNF-wide Adoption Committee aimed at establishing atomic networks to fuel the expansion and use of verifiable credentials. The EDCAT brings together approximately 40 organizations to pool ideas, connections, resources, and efforts to enact education-related use cases on the Velocity Network infrastructure. In addition to supporting the US Healthcare and Arkansas ecosystems, EDCAT is pursuing several emerging use cases that we welcome additional organizations to get involved: One geography of interest is the Texas credentialing ecosystem, as we have members working with the Texas College and University Systems in that region, as well as other consulting firms facilitating ecosystems in the Texas credentialing market. Another emerging ecosystem involves military transfers to education and work. A third emerging ecosystem involves a multi-state demonstration of interoperability… Velocity is already active across the US with bottoms-up (private efforts) and tops-down (government-led) credentialing ecosystems… VNF EDCAT is exploring how to engage more states to prove out the utility of an open, global infrastructure. If you have a state ecosystem that you would like to engage in this effort, please reach out.
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Product Committee
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Celebrating Trust… Velocity is THE Career Credentials Global Trust Framework! Velocity has worked with its members and community of users for years to develop a trust network for the global exchange of verifiable credentials. Velocity is unique in that it offers a solution for identity, education, employment, and any other credential relevant over the lifetime of a person’s career—no other Network supports this range of credentials in a secure, trusted, private, and globally compliant way, while also enabling for a distributed ledger and governance model led by the organizations that have a stake in Network operations. Over the past season, the Network has received formal recognition by industry experts, such as Rick Golgar from IBM, and other influential organizations from around the world. Please see some of our recent posts about Velocity as a Trust Network and Governance by our CTO, Andres Olave: Self Sovereign Identity and Issuer Trust.
In Digital Wallets… Come try our Web-wallet SDK! This season, VCL enhanced the Web Wallet SDK and also set forth the first Velocity-enabled Web-wallets: the Sertifier web-wallet and the VCL reference web-wallet, now available in Alpha version. This is an important development to meet the needs of a broad range of individual users, some of whom have limited digital literacy and/or do not maintain a regular mobile device. We anticipate seeing the web-wallets as an important tool for our corrections department and low-income community use cases. A web-wallet offers a custodial wallet that enables users to store their credentials within the platform; it also removes the need to download a mobile app and set up the wallet on an individual’s mobile device. The web-wallet SDK is available for free, along with the other Velocity mobile-wallet SDKs. We look forward to seeing more organizations leverage these tools to build applications for their constituents!
In Data Schemas… New Nursing License Schema Approved! The new NCSBN-sponsored nursing license schema was approved and will be deployed on Velocity Network in the next week. Documentation on the new schema will also be updated in the Credential Types section in the technical documentation on the Velocity Network Foundation website. This is of monumental importance and is an asset to health care credentialing ecosystems that may not know how to issue a nursing license. Many education ecosystems have not thought beyond the badge, but industry-specific credentials often have unique rules on how they must be transacted in a verifiable digital format. The Velocity Standards Committee collaboratively explored the unique requirements of the nursing license to develop a schema that meets the critical compliance requirements of the industry. The Velocity Credential agent harmonizes these standards and allows an issuer to issue any of the required types, and it supports any relying party being able to receive and verify any of the supported credential types. Similarly, the Velocity Wallet SDKs enable digital wallets to transact any of these key credential types. We thank everyone who participated in this important work, and we expect to see more Healthcare Ecosystems converge on Velocity Network Foundation!
Also in Data Schemas… Welcome, Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) Standard! Several key education members met over several months to determine exactly how CLR’s should work on Velocity. Their collective goal was to apply real life uses cases to inform how VNF should best implement the CLR Standard on Velocity Network so that all entities working on Velocity Network can choose to leverage this standard. First recommendations are anticipated to be presented this July to the Standards Committee for adoption in the Velocity toolset. A special thank you to participating organizations: AACRAO, RANDA, Territorium, 1EdTech, and Velocity Career Labs.
In New Features… Credentials with PDF Attachments Possible! This season, the VNF Standards Committee invested time in developing the capability for the Credential Agent to issue verifiable credentials that include PDF attachments. While typically this is not a recommended practice due to the content of the PDF increasing the payload on an individual’s web wallet or holder application, members proposed government uses cases in which this capability was desirable. To enable all members to achieve their business goals on Velocity, the Governance system in VNF maintains a forum for members to propose changes to the technologies offered by the foundation. The organization’s implementation of PDF attachments was one example of how Velocity Network Foundation is responsive to its members’ business needs.
Thank you to all of our Members and a special thank you to our volunteer Advisory Board, Board of Directors, and Committee Chairs.