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Beyond the Resume: Why 2026 Can be the Year Hiring Gets an Upgrade
For decades, businesses have relied on resumes and transcripts to find talent. However, in an era of AI-generated applications, these static documents are failing. Employers are flooded with unverified claims, while skilled candidates struggle to prove their capabilities. The LER Ecosystem Report - 2026 reveals a solution: a shift from paper-based proxies to a secure, verified digital infrastructure – driven not only by hiring challenges, but by broader pressures across education, employment, and public systems. As Jason Tyszko, Senior Vice President at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, notes in the report, this New Data Paradigm is being accelerated by the need to verify outcomes at scale—particularly as employment and earnings data become critical to compliance, eligibility, and workforce policy.
What is an LER?
A Learning and Employment Record (LER) is a digital passport for a person’s career. Unlike a self-reported resume, an LER is a collection of verified records capturing degrees, specific skills, licenses, volunteer/community engagement, and work experiences. Crucially, these records are portable - providing the individual with open access to their information rather than reliance on institutions. Workers can share their verified history instantly, without chasing down former HR departments. For businesses, this represents a massive upgrade in trust. Importantly, LERs are not a single product or platform, but a shared data approach that allows records to move across systems while governance remains decentralized.
The Business Case: Why This Matters Now
While "skills-based hiring" is a common goal, verifying skills has traditionally been too slow and expensive. The 2026 report highlights how LERs solve this:
- Solving the Trust Gap: Generative AI has made creating perfect-looking resumes easy, drowning employers in noise. LERs cut through this by providing data that is already verified, eliminating doubts about a candidate's credentials.
- Speed and Efficiency: Instead of verifying candidates at the end of the process, LERs move verification to the beginning. Hiring managers can instantly search for candidates with specific, proven certifications, streamlining the funnel.
- Unlocking Hidden Talent: Millions possess skills learned on the job or in the military that don't appear on transcripts. LERs make these "invisible" skills visible, widening the talent pool.
These same verification challenges are now surfacing well beyond hiring – particularly in public systems that must validate employment and earnings with precision.
From Pilot Projects to Real Infrastructure
The ecosystem is leaving the experimental phase and becoming critical infrastructure, driven by collective action like the T3 Innovation Network as systems across education, employment, and public programs converge on the need for trusted, verifiable data. Through T3 projects like Experience You, which uses AI to issue verifiable records from past experiences and achievements, and the LER Resume Standard (LER-RS), which bridges the gap between digital records and traditional hiring systems, the T3 Network is helping operationalize the technical challenges that previously held this technology back. These initiatives are focused on ensuring that data can flow seamlessly between employers, educators, and workers, creating a truly interoperable market.
Momentum is visible across the board:
- Government: States like Alabama, Arkansas, and Colorado are implementing systems to match resident skills with local employers.
- Higher Education: Colleges are issuing digital records at scale to help graduates secure employment.
- Employers: Major organizations are acting. HCA Healthcare uses verifiable credentials to streamline nursing hires, while The Manufacturing Institute uses LERs to translate military experience for civilian careers.
The Road Ahead
The transition to this new data economy is underway. For business leaders, the tools to hire faster and more accurately are finally online. By engaging with this ecosystem- whether accepting digital credentials or issuing LERs to the workforce- businesses help build a labor market that values what people can actually do. The future of hiring isn't about reading more resumes; it is about better data. As the New Data Paradigm takes hold, the real shift is not just better hiring – but the emergence of a shared data foundation that allows learning, work, and opportunity to connect across systems.
