The CTO Challenge: Building Education-to-Workforce Ecosystems at Scale
The Connecting Talent to Opportunity Challenge is arguably the most significant federal initiative to coordinate an education-to-employment pipeline at the state level. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the $15 million prize competition is intended to strengthen the connections between learners, education institutions and training providers, and employers by fostering the development of integrated talent marketplaces. As of this writing, ten states are semifinalists.
Successful talent ecosystems require more than just another platform: they need governance, interoperability, trusted data, and collaboration across stakeholders. The two-year program will be a test of states’ ability to build production-level systems that offer real value to both job seekers and businesses.
“It’s a true public, widespread recognition that this work is important. We’ve been doing skills and talent and LERs and CLRs for years in lots of pockets and lots of pilots, but this is a way for the Department of Education to say this is critical enough to develop on a larger scale.” — Kelly Hoyland, Director of Strategic Project Management and Skills Ecosystem Strategy, Unicon
The stakes are high: if states focus on meaningless metrics or credentials that carry no weight with employers, funding could dry up, making a true skills-to-workforce pipeline even more of a pipe dream.
Based on Unicon’s three decades of experience across K–12, higher education, and workforce technology, as well as established partnerships with prominent skills-first advocates such as C-BEN, we’ve identified three essential components of a successful talent marketplace.
It’s not the tools, it’s the plumbing
The education sector and workforce organizations have invested heavily in technologies designed to improve learner mobility and skills-based hiring. As an industry, we’ve built student information systems, launched learning and employment records (LERs), developed skills taxonomies, and piloted talent marketplaces. Yet the promise of seamless education-to-employment pathways remains largely unrealized.
The problem isn’t a lack of technology, it’s a lack of infrastructure to make that technology work together. All of those components contain pieces of the puzzle, but rarely are they designed to communicate with each other. As a result, data becomes trapped inside disconnected applications, forcing institutions, employers, and learners to try to fill those gaps on their own.
This infrastructure enables insights that traditional hiring practices miss. Kelly notes that Alabama recently faced a shortage of individuals with the skills to work in healthcare labs. “They were able to go back to their skill inventory and realize that there’s actually a significant overlap with food safety protocols,” she says. Realizing there was an existing pool of talent to pull from, the states decided to target food safety professionals for upskilling. “It gave those individuals an entry point to an entirely new set of opportunities, and employers an expanded pool of candidates.”
That’s the promise of statewide skills ecosystems, not simply documenting what people know and what they can do, but uncovering pathways that help learners and workers find jobs while helping employers find talent they might otherwise overlook.
Developing a common language
Infrastructure begins with governance, which includes agreeing on how to define skills, competencies, credentials, and learning outcomes. “Take the word ‘micro-credential,’” says Kelly. “Every institution has defined it differently. At one school, a micro-credential had to be anything less than a credit, while in another it had to be three or more credits.” Without shared definitions and policies, even technically interoperable systems struggle to exchange meaningful information.
But it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of terminology. “I’ve seen rooms of people argue over whether something is a skill or a competency,” says Kelly. “We can spend an entire day debating what an LER is and how it should be designed and implemented. What we need to focus on is how do we get real people into real jobs using skills data.”
Often the underlying issue is a fear of getting things wrong. “Higher ed doesn’t want a system like this to do any harm,” she says. “But a lack of progress is also a form of harm.”
The need for trusted data
Interoperability is a linchpin of skills-to-workforce initiatives, but true interoperability is more than enabling data to move seamlessly between systems: it generates trust in its value. Technical interoperability and digital credentialing mean little if employers don’t understand or believe what those credentials represent.
“There are two pieces: one is understanding your data, but also making sure you are giving employers quality data that’s trustworthy: making sure that it actually tells a story and doesn’t just paint a broad picture,” says Kelly. “Because if we get that wrong, employers are just going to ignore these marketplaces.”
While AI is getting better at extracting skills from coursework and work experience, the need for trust makes implementing human oversight to define skills, verify learner achievements, and ensure meaningful context even more important. This requires involving employers early, understanding how they evaluate candidates, and identifying the skills and evidence they actually need.
The proof is in production
For years, the education-to-workforce community has demonstrated what’s possible through pilots and proof-of-concept projects. The CTO Challenge asks a different question: can we build tools for skills-based hiring at scale?
The answer won’t come from creating another platform. It will come from strengthening the infrastructure that enables skills mobility and portable credentials: shared governance, interoperable data, open standards, and the technical foundation that allows existing systems to work together.
That’s where Unicon comes in. We help states and institutions build the connective tissue behind education-to-workforce ecosystems. From governance and interoperability assessments to technical due diligence and systems integration, the goal isn’t to replace existing investments; it’s to help them work together.
If the CTO Challenge succeeds, its legacy will be greater than that of the individual state marketplaces. It will be showing that learner-centered, skills-based ecosystems can become scalable infrastructure, helping learners discover new opportunities while giving employers a faster, more accurate, and more reliable way to find the talent they need.
