What is a Learning and Employment Record,
and why should high school students start one now?
A Learning and Employment Record (LER) is a digital record of an individual's skills, credentials, and experiences that follows them through their career. The entire LER infrastructure being built today targets adults entering the workforce. Nobody is building it for high school students. That's exactly where it should start.
A Learning and Employment Record (LER) is a digital representation of an individual's learning and work history, built from credentials, skills demonstrated through experience, formal education, and employment. Unlike a resume, which is assembled at a point of need, an LER is built continuously and belongs to the individual, not to an employer or school.
The concept is being advanced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the Education Design Lab, and a growing number of workforce development organizations as a solution to skills-based hiring: if employers are going to hire based on demonstrated skills rather than just degree credentials, they need a trustworthy record of what candidates can actually do. LERs are designed to be that record.
The critical gap: every LER initiative in operation today starts at the point of workforce entry or later. Nobody is building the record during high school, when the foundational experiences that become the most compelling early-career evidence are actually happening.
More than 70 million adults in the United States are skilled through community college, workforce training, bootcamps, military service, or on-the-job learning rather than through a bachelor's degree. LERs are being built to serve them. But the habits, experiences, and durable skills that define early-career capability are built during high school. Starting the record at 22 means missing the four most formative years.
The case for starting an LER in high school is straightforward: the experiences that matter most in early career transitions happen between 14 and 18. Sports, volunteering, CTE coursework, work-based learning, internships, part-time jobs, creative work, leadership roles, this is when durable skills like collaboration, problem-solving, self-management, and communication are built through doing real things in the real world.
By the time a student reaches 18 or 22 and tries to construct a record, two problems emerge. First, the details fade. The specific challenges navigated during a work-based learning placement, the team dynamics of a three-year athletic career, the exact role played in a volunteer project, these become generic over time. "I played soccer" loses the texture that made the experience skill-building. Second, the habit of seeing your own experience through the lens of capability hasn't been developed. Students who have never been taught to name their own skills don't suddenly gain that ability when they need it most.
An effective early-career LER answers three questions for every significant experience a student has had:
Not just "I volunteered at a food bank", what was their specific role, what were they responsible for, what did they handle when things went wrong? The specificity is what makes it proof rather than a bullet point.
The translation from experience description into professional skills language is the step most students cannot perform on their own. They need a system that does this translation accurately and consistently.
A record that shows what a student has built is valuable. A record that also shows what they're building toward, and where the gaps are, is a guide. That's the difference between documentation and direction.
Volly is not a formal LER system in the technical standards sense, there is no single universal LER standard that has been broadly adopted yet. What Volly is is the practical high school starting point for what the LER movement is trying to build at scale: a student-owned, continuously updated, skills-focused record of real experience that follows the individual wherever they go.
The Volly Skills Record belongs to the student, not to the school or the employer. It captures experiences in plain language and translates them into professional skills language. It follows the student through every program change, every path pivot, and every stage of their career. It is, in intent and design, an LER that starts where an LER should start, at 14, not at 22.
When the formal LER infrastructure matures and employers begin evaluating candidates through skills-based systems, students who have been building their record since high school will enter that system with four to eight years of documented capability. Students who started building at 22 will be catching up.
For schools, the LER conversation is directly relevant to CTE accountability requirements. The same question that drives LER adoption, how do we prove what students can do, not just what credentials they hold, is the question states are asking of CTE programs under Perkins V and accountability frameworks like California's College/Career Indicator.
Schools that give students the infrastructure to build a skills record during high school are not just serving those students better. They are generating the aggregate skills data that demonstrates what their programs produce, the evidence base for accountability reporting, grant development, and employer partnerships that most schools currently cannot show.