Skills Currency: Building a Common Language Between Education and Employment

Insights from ERP’s First Pilot with Students
Translating Learning Into Earnings

Educational Results Partnership (ERP) launched its Skills Currency initiative in 2025 to address this challenge and improve the efficiency of talent-to-job matching. At the core of the initiative is an algorithm that translates academic performance into workforce-relevant skills and aligns those skills with labor market demand.

Importantly, Skills Currency does not ask educators, schools, or students to do more. Instead, it seeks to translate and derive additional value from the teaching and learning already happening in K–12 schools.

In Spring 2026, ERP partnered with Rowland Unified School District in Los Angeles County, California to pilot the first phase of Skills Currency–providing students with skills profiles. ERP delivered personalized skills profiles to all 1,038 Rowland USD seniors through its SkillSight platform. Following implementation, 298 students participated in a survey to provide feedback
about the value of receiving this information.

The findings suggest that when students gain greater visibility into the skills they have developed through school, they are better able to understand their top skills, identify destination and starter occupations aligned with those strengths, and have greater confidence in the value they can offer to future employers.

At the center of the initiative is the Skills Currency algorithm. The algorithm analyzes multiple forms of academic performance data accumulated throughout a student’s high school experience to generate a skills profile. Together, these indicators provide evidence of student learning and skills development across multiple years, subjects and contexts. The following academic data are used to make up a student’s skills profile: high school course grades, state assessment results, standardized test scores in English language arts, mathematics, and Science, Lexile® measures, Quantile® measures, and the Lexile® and Quantile® Career Database.

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