Further advancing learner pathways, West Virginia joins national collaborative building on Credential WV

The goal is to create sustainable, statewide framework that makes credentials more portable, skills more visible, and transitions more seamless for learners.

Higher education leaders in West Virginia announced today that the state will join the Learning Mobility Collaborative (LMC), a nationwide movement supported by Education Design Lab with key partners including AACRAO and Strada Education Foundation. This movement is an effort to align education and workforce systems to empower learners with the ability to build, own, and articulate their learning - knowledge, skills, competencies, and credentials - across fragmented education and employment silos and life stages.

The decision builds on the strong foundation of the state's ongoing microcredential initiative, Credential WV, and opens a new chapter in West Virginia's commitment to creating seamless education-to-employment pathways for all learners. The West Virginia Collaborative to Advance Learning Mobility (WV CALM) will engage stakeholders statewide to help students get recognized for what they know and can do and earn credentials that open doors to better jobs.

"The collaborative will help us build on Credential WV and other efforts to help learners earn postsecondary credentials of value in less time at a lower cost," said Chancellor Sarah Armstrong Tucker of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission and Community and Technical College System. "This includes ongoing initiatives to promote dual enrollment and Open Education Resources, developing seamless transfer pathways, and participation in the Rural Talent Lab Development initiative, which will expand education and employment opportunities in some of the most rural and economically challenged counties in the state."

"Joining the Learning Mobility Collaborative ensures that every West Virginian's learning is visible, portable, and valued," said Julia Spears, Assistant Provost for Online Education and Certification at Marshall University and co-chair of Credential West Virginia. "Building on Credential WV, we're making it easier for learners to stack skills toward degrees and good jobs without starting over."

Leveraging West Virginia's microcredential progress

Launched through the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission and the West Virginia Community and Technical College System, Credential WV(opens in a new tab) is a statewide initiative engaging all public two- and four-year institutions in West Virginia to think differently about how to deliver in-demand, job-aligned knowledge and skills by redesigning curricula, awarding and tracking new types of credentials, and developing a shared set of quality standards to promote credential integrity, transparency, and comparability. Through Credential WV, higher education institutions in West Virginia have been empowered to develop industry-recognized micro-credential pathways - embedded within or alongside traditional academic programs - to expand access, reduce cost, and deliver targeted skills aligned with workforce needs.

By joining the Learning Mobility Collaborative, West Virginia will build on this momentum, extending the state's efforts from micro-credentials toward a broader, integrated infrastructure that recognizes all forms of learning, supports transitions between institutions and between education and work, and empowers learners to bring their achievements and credentials wherever their learning and career journeys take them.

"Learning mobility transforms how New Majority Learners move between education and employment. By enabling credentials to travel with learners and surface validated skills across institutions, we can eliminate system barriers that too often obstruct transitions and slow their progress toward better jobs and higher-paying careers," said Colin Reynolds, Senior Impact Director at Education Design Lab.

What joining the Learning Mobility Collaborative means

As a member of the LMC, West Virginia will work alongside other states to:

• Establish shared frameworks and standards for validating and transferring learning experiences.
• Develop common approaches and standards for recognizing prior learning and nontraditional credentials.
• Create interoperable technical systems and data infrastructures that enable learners to control their education and employment records, institutions to exchange credential and learning data, and employers to verify skills more easily.
• Align policy, institutional practice, and infrastructure to ensure that learners - especially those facing the greatest barriers - can move across institutions, stack credentials toward degrees or employment, and engage in meaningful career transitions.

Over the next year, the West Virginia Learning Mobility Collaborative will establish three new working groups to build on and expand the work of Credential WV. The first will focus on establishing aligned processes and strengthening institutional capacity in validating, documenting, and transcribing micro-credentials. The second will advance policy and process in prior learning assessment and credit for prior learning across the state through the development of statewide guidance and implementation resources. The third working group will concentrate on pathway design and stackability of credentials, expanding programs in priority industries, developing a playbook for embedding durable skills into existing programs, and identifying new opportunities for skills-based pathways throughout the state. Together these groups will set the direction for the year ahead: Building shared infrastructure, strengthening institutional capacity, and working toward a world in which learners can move more seamlessly through educational and career pathways.