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Skills Shouldn't Stop at State Lines: Inside ED’s Connecting Talent to Opportunity Challenge

Since 2025, Kaptivate has managed a national innovation prize challenge for the U.S. Department of Education that helps states make workers' skills verifiable and portable through Talent Marketplaces. These marketplaces are public digital systems that helps connect people’s skills and credentials to education and job opportunities, so learning earned in one place counts across states.

 

Kaptivate Solutions Deployed

Innovation Competitions

Developed a prize competition to help states build lasting, connected workforce systems linking skills to opportunities throughout country.

Community Activation

Coordinated states, technology providers, subject matter experts, and standard-defining organizations to advance a critical strategic initiative.

Program Management

Organized a complex program of technical assistance supporting state efforts to launch, or evolve, their talent marketplaces with interoperability as its destination.
Talent Marketplace FIles

The challenge: skills that don't travel

Millions of Americans are on the sidelines of work. Labor force participation peaked at 67.3% in March 2000 and now sits near 62.5%. Reaching that peak again would add more than 10 million workers, enough to fill every open job in the country.

The gaps are sharpest in the skilled trades. For every five workers who retire, only two replacements arrive. By 2030, about 2.1 million skilled trades jobs could go unfilled. More than one in ten young people ages 16 to 24 are neither in school nor working.

The Education Department saw a common root cause: skills are hard to see and harder to move. The U.S. has nearly 2 million credentials from more than 130,000 providers. Each state keeps its records in its own systems and formats. A certificate earned in one state often means little to an employer in the next.

The Education Department asked: How do we help states build Talent Marketplace systems where verified skills open doors, wherever a person learned them?

Our approach: a challenge built for state systems

Kaptivate designed the Connecting Talent to Opportunity (CTO) Challenge to empower states to build lasting, connected systems.

  • States lead. Governors are the official entrants. Skills data lives across many agencies, so the fix needs executive-level leadership.
  • Teams cross silos. Each state team must include its Perkins agency, Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) agency, state workforce agencies, and state workforce board.
  • One clear target. A defined Talent Marketplace as four connected parts: Learning and Employment Records (portable, verified resumes), a credential registry, skills-based job translation tools, and AI that supports training and career advancement.
  • Two entry points. "Novice" states build from the ground up. "Scaler" states expand what they already have. Every state can take part.
  • Support, not just competition. The Education Department announced the challenge in December 2025 and launched it on January 13, 2026, with webinars and informational briefings. States then submitted action plans showing strong collaboration and governance commitments.

On June 8, 2026, the Education Department named 10 semifinalists: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Each entered a six-month incubation with tailored technical assistance, expert guidance, and a national community of practice.

The big lift: getting states to speak one language

Ten states building ten Talent Marketplaces could easily produce ten new silos. A worker's verified skills would stop at the state line. That is the hardest problem in this work, and we built the challenge to take it on from day one.

Interoperability-revised

  • A shared skills currency. Every marketplace turns learning into machine-readable, industry-recognized competency statements. Degrees, certificates, apprenticeships, military service, and on-the-job experience all translate into the same language.
  • Building to shared standards. During incubation, states work directly with standards organizations and technical experts to align their Talent Marketplaces with common standards and approaches.
  • Solve it once, share it widely. The community of practice lets states trade lessons and reusable solutions instead of each solving the same problem alone.

The goal is a worker whose skills are recognized in Montana, Georgia, or Hawaii alike, and an employer who can trust what a record says, no matter which state issued it.

Where we stand: incubation nears the finish line

Ten months after launch, the CTO Challenge is on track. The 10 semifinalists are in the final weeks of their six-month incubation. They are turning action plans into working designs, with technical assistance and peer support at every step. Next, finalists move from plans to live systems, building and scaling their Talent Marketplaces through April 2028.

Implementation Progress_RevisedWhat's ahead

  • For workers: verified skills that travel across jobs, schools, and state lines.
  • For employers: faster, lower-cost hiring based on what people can actually do.
  • For learners: credit for what they already know, including advanced standing in training programs and registered apprenticeships.
  • For the nation: a proven model other states can adopt, and stronger talent pipelines for shipbuilding, nuclear energy, aerospace, AI, and more.

Kaptivate will keep that momentum going. We'll coordinate technical assistance, convene the community of practice, connect states with standards bodies and subject matter experts, and help the models scale.

The aim is simple: learning that counts wherever it happens.