As the world shifts toward skills-based hiring and learning, new terms like digital credentials, LERs, and CLRs are becoming more common—but also more confusing. These terms are often used interchangeably, even though they refer to different (but related) concepts.

A Universal Talent Passport (UTP) brings clarity to this landscape by treating all experience—formal credentials, informal learning, work history, personal projects, and lived experiences—as structured Learning & Employment Records (LERs) that can be verified through evidence, endorsements, or institutional issuers.

Below, we break down how these components work together and why they matter for the future of talent mobility.

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1. What Are Digital Credentials?

Digital credentials are the broadest category: any digitally issued or digitally stored proof of a skill, achievement, or qualification.

These can include:

• Digital badges
• Certificates
• Micro-credentials
• Licenses
• Degrees
• Completion records

Digital credentials can vary widely in quality, detail, and trust. Some include deep metadata; others include only a title, issuer, and date.

Digital credentials were the first step toward a portable, verifiable skills ecosystem—but they are not enough on their own to represent a person’s full capability.

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2. What Are LERs (Learning and Employment Records)?

LERs are structured digital records designed to capture what a person knows, what they can do, and how they learned it.

They go beyond credentials.
An LER can represent:

• A job
• A project
• A measurable outcome
• A role someone played
• Skills demonstrated through experience
• A training program
• A competency assessment
• A lived experience that built transferable skills

LERs include evidence, metadata, and context, making them more informative and trustworthy than badges or certificates alone.

LERs can be:

• Issued by an organization
• Co-created by an individual (e.g., describing a work project or skill demonstration)
• Verified by endorsements or evidence

This makes LERs flexible enough to represent all forms of learning, not only formal or institutional ones.

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3. What Are CLRs (Comprehensive Learner Records)?

A CLR is a type of LER—specifically designed to represent a student’s learning in a comprehensive, structured way.

CLRs typically:

• Come from schools or academic institutions
• Capture curricular + co-curricular learning
• Include competencies, assessments, and learning outcomes
• Are intended to replace or supplement transcripts

Important clarity:

• All CLRs are LERs.
• Not all LERs are CLRs.

Many people confuse the terms because they share similar goals: improving the portability and clarity of learning data. But CLRs focus on education, while LERs encompass education + employment + experience + skills.

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4. Why the Terms Get Mixed Up (and Why It Matters)

In 2023, the industry lacks a fully unified vocabulary. Different organizations use terms like:

• Badge
• Credential
• Micro-credential
• LER
• CLR
• Portfolio artifact
• Employment record

Sometimes they mean the same thing. Sometimes they don’t.

This inconsistency makes it difficult for learners, workers, and employers to understand what a credential represents—and how much trust they should place in it.

The Universal Talent Passport was designed to bring coherence to this fragmented ecosystem.

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5. How LERs and CLRs Work Inside a Universal Talent Passport

A Universal Talent Passport does not require verified credentials to function.

However, it is deliberately designed as:

✔ A native LER-based system

Everything inside the passport—every skill, project, job, role, experience, or achievement—is represented using a structured LER schema that includes:

• Details (what happened)
• Skills (what was demonstrated)
• Context (where / why / how)
• Evidence (supporting proof)
• Verification (endorsement or issuer)

This ensures portability, machine readability, and cross-context clarity.

✔ A credential wallet that can store LER-compatible credentials

The UTP can hold:

• Digital credentials
• CLRs
• LERs issued by organizations
• Individual-created LERs
• Hybrid LERs with mixed sources of evidence

Every artifact is normalized into the same underlying structure, creating consistency and comparability.

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6. Why We Built the UTP Around LERs (2023 Point of View)

In 2023, Gobekli’s founding belief is simple:

LERs are the sustainable standard for the future of talent mobility.

Why?

Because LERs:

✔ Capture learning wherever it happens
✔ Represent both formal and informal experience
✔ Support verification through evidence or issuers
✔ Translate skills into machine-readable formats
✔ Can evolve as the person evolves
✔ Enable AI-driven reflection, matching, and opportunity mapping
✔ Create a universal language for talent

Credential wallets alone cannot do this.
CLRs alone cannot do this.
Badges alone cannot do this.

Only a fully structured, flexible, evidence-ready data architecture—powered by LERs—can represent human capability across a lifetime.

That is why the Universal Talent Passport is, by design, a personal LER ecosystem, not just a credential container.

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7. So How Important Are Verified Credentials, LERs, and CLRs in the UTP?

Verified Credentials:

Enhance trust and reduce fraud—but are not the only source of truth.

LERs:

The backbone of the entire system.
They allow every piece of experience to be structured, contextualized, and portable.

CLRs:

A valuable, education-specific subset of LERs that enrich a learner’s academic narrative.

Evidence & Endorsements:

Provide flexible verification when institutions are not yet issuing LERs.

Together, these components make the Universal Talent Passport:

• Trustworthy
• Standards-aligned
• Future-ready
• Learner-centered
• Employer-friendly
• Machine-readable
• Interoperable