Durable skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking consistently rank among the most in-demand competencies in the labor market. Yet they remain among the hardest to assess, validate, and translate into signals employers can actually use.
The result is a familiar three-way breakdown:
- Learners develop skills but struggle to prove them in ways that carry across contexts.
- Institutions are building those skills every day but lack consistent, scalable ways to measure or credential them.
- Employers know these skills matter but are left interpreting fragmented, inconsistent evidence when evaluating talent.
That is the gap our partnership with EBSCOed is designed to close. We are thrilled to share that the Pathsmith™ Durable Skills Framework has been selected as the exclusive durable skills backbone of LER.me Talent Marketplace, the new free, open-access Learning and Employment Record (LER) talent marketplace launched by EBSCOed, a division of EBSCO Information Services. The new Durable Skills Marketplace will make it possible for durable skills to be defined, measured, credentialed, and made visible at scale.
A Framework Built for This Moment
We developed Pathsmith™ because employers, educators, and policymakers kept asking the same questions: Which skills matter most? How do we define them consistently? And how do we know when someone has actually mastered them?
To answer those questions, we analyzed more than 80 million job postings and built a comprehensive framework with input from employers, educators, psychometricians, and equity-focused researchers. The result: 10 skill domains, 74 individual skills, and 4 proficiency levels that are now mapped across more than 1,000 O*NET occupations. It is a shared language for the durable skills that drive success across roles, industries, and career stages.
On LER.me, Pathsmith™ serves as the bedrock layer of the platform’s durable skills ontology. Occupational and technical skills sit on top of it. Every credential issued, every recommendation generated, and every match made in the marketplace rests on a durable skills foundation.
What LER.me Makes Possible
LER.me is a free, open-access platform designed to connect the full workforce ecosystem. Learners can build portable, privacy-first credential wallets that tell their complete skills story. Institutions can issue verified credentials directly to those wallets. Employers can discover talent based on demonstrated capability rather than proxies alone. And states, workforce agencies, and workforce development boards gain access to shared labor market dashboards and credential analytics to support skills-based policy at scale.
The platform is built on open standards, aligned with the U.S. Department of Education’s definition of full-scale talent marketplaces. Because Pathsmith™ is the exclusive durable skills framework on the platform, assessments are grounded in a common, employer-informed architecture. Learners build verified, portable records tied to consistent definitions and performance levels, and employers can interpret those records with far greater clarity and confidence.
A Clear Path for Institutions
The question of how to assess durable skills in a credible, scalable way has long gone unanswered. That changes with this partnership.
Anyone can create a free profile on LER.me. Institutions, states, districts, and employers that subscribe to the Durable Skills Marketplace unlock the full Pathsmith™ framework, including detailed proficiency rubrics and two complementary assessment types. Context-aware assessments evaluate durable skills inside real workflows, such as work-based learning placements, internships, and on-the-job tasks, observing evidence in context and scoring it against the Pathsmith™ rubric. Simulation assessments place learners in scenario-based exercises, virtual or in-person, designed to elicit demonstrations of specific skills under controlled, repeatable conditions. Both assessment types issue verifiable OBv3 credentials directly into the learner’s portable LER wallet.
When institutions embed Pathsmith™ into their programs and issue verified credentials against it, the evidence they generate becomes discoverable and actionable. For the first time, there is a clear pathway where durable skills are not just defined, but measured, credentialed, and made visible at scale.
If you work at a postsecondary institution, a state agency, a workforce development board, or anywhere in the education-to-employment pipeline, now is the time to explore what this looks like in practice.
Explore the Durable Skills Marketplace or visit LER.me to learn more.
