Elliot Gillerman is Senior Vice President for Strategy & Insights at CredLens, a national non-profit data trust working to make sense of the growing non-degree credential ecosystem. In his role, Elliot is responsible for crafting CredLens’ product strategy as well as overseeing the organization’s data and research partnerships. Drawing on experience from Chegg, Penn Foster, and Boston Consulting Group, Elliot is focused on expanding access to economic opportunity by bridging the gap between education and employment. 

Elliot’s work aligns closely with learning society’s mission to empower new forms of learning throughout people’s lives. We asked him about the future of education, how to build collaborations that better develop human talent, and what success metrics matter most for a learning society.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity:

What does organizing the life course around learning rather than schooling mean to you and your organization?

We have to start by acknowledging that important learning happens everywhere at various points throughout your life — not just in classrooms. This isn’t a particularly novel idea, but it’s important to name if we want to develop a new narrative that goes beyond narrowly defining success as earning a college degree. Regardless of where learning happens across school, work, and the rest of life, we need a common way of describing the range of skills and experiences we accumulate through our lives. It’s about creating systems that capture and reflect what people actually know and can do, using up-to-date information from places like professional profiles or other verified records. Ultimately, it’s about making lifelong learning visible and valued so everyone’s growth is recognized and rewarded in ways that everyone from a prospective student to a hiring manager can understand.

People are living and working into their 70s and 80s — and changing careers far more often than previous generations. How should this reshape how we think about education and training?

As a society, we need to do a better job helping people, regardless of their age or stage in life, understand and evaluate the range of opportunities available to them. Think about a really good school guidance counselor and the impact they can have on a young person’s life. Once that person graduates, though, they’re more or less on their own. They may turn to friends, family, and strangers on the internet — all of whom are probably well-intentioned — but also probably not the best or most objective source of information. A major challenge is finding ways to deliver the advice of the best guidance counselor at scale and over the course of someone’s life. I think there’s a major role for technology, data, and artificial intelligence to play here — but we’re also in the early stages of building solutions and policies to make that vision a reality.

What’s one way that schools, employers and policymakers could better collaborate to develop human talent?

We need to fundamentally reimagine how all three of these sectors collaborate with one another, though I’m not sure anyone has solved this perfectly yet. I see lots of promise in what states like Colorado and Ohio are doing in terms of integrating education, workforce, and economic development under single agencies. This sets up state-level policies to be much more integrated and unified in how they aligning goals, programs, and funding. 

It’s also essential to bring employers at the table in ways that engage them as “customers” of the talent our education system is producing. If we start with the end state in mind in terms of jobs we need to train for, in theory, we can map backwards from there. This is a lot harder than it sounds, and there’s a good chance that AI’s impact on jobs and the broader economy will make this an even harder target to aim at. That’s the case for smart, flexible systems that use as-close-to real-time information as possible to understand and stay ahead of changes in the economy and labor market.

Beyond graduation rates and test scores that informed policy analysis in the schooled society, what sorts of data and indicators should we develop to measure progress in the learning society?

We need a much deeper understanding of what happens after someone graduates, and fundamentally, whether their education helped them get where they wanted to go. At my organization, CredLens, our central focus is helping education, training, and credentialing organizations understand the real-world impact of their offerings. Our partners rely on that data to make improvements and communicate their impact to learners and the broader public. The way we think about outcomes goes beyond just attainment and focuses on earnings and employment: how does earning a given credential impact someone’s earnings and where they end up working?

There’s another important, but harder to measure concept here around satisfaction with where students landed after graduation. I have three young kids at home, so I think a lot about early childhood education and the amazing teachers who work with my kids. I know that none of them entered the profession expecting to make a lot of money (that’s a topic for another day), but they love working with kids. That’s something that a wage premium doesn’t capture, and I think it’s a sometimes underappreciated part of the story.

If you could change one thing about how we invest in people’s talent and potential, what would it be and why?

Opportunity cost is a major obstacle, especially for adults who may want to pursue additional education once they’ve left high school. If you’re a working adult with a full-time job and a family at home, your schedule most likely requires you to fit coursework into nights and weekends. Historically, we’ve described working adult learners as “non-traditional,” but it turns out they are now essentially the median learner. So we need to start by understanding who we’re serving and reimagine a system that works for them, rather than the other way around.

Dialogues is a Q&A series featuring conversations with fellows, partners, and experts across workforce development, higher education and philanthropy. Through this series, we aim to give our readers digestible insights into how leaders in these spaces are thinking about the pressing challenges of our times — and how a learning-oriented model of human capital development can come to fruition.