I had the privilege of giving a 5-minute Ignite-style presentation at the annual HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas this year, on the topic of Taking Back Control of our Professional Digital Identities. This topic is a concept whose time has come – it’s a matter of WHEN, not IF, that individuals will demand that their experience with your organization include portable, verified professional profiles.
What comprises our professional digital identity? Certainly, education and development, whether gained through academic institutions, MOOCS, licensing agencies, employer-sponsored training or any other form of development. Job information including positions held and projects completed – because today’s jobs come not just through employer-employee relationships but through freelance project work, assignments through temp agencies and more. And all those assessments we take, either as part of the pre-employment process, as ongoing career development or even as a part of our own personal growth? These should be part of our digital professional “portfolio” as well, so that we have ready access to the various measures of our capabilities, skills, personality traits and aptitudes to more effectively match against new work opportunities. Many other elements may come into our digital professional portfolio as well, but the challenge today is our inability to readily access all of this information at our fingertips and communicate it as trusted, verified information.
Taking back control of our digital professional identities is about individuals taking ownership of their career credentials, aggregating education and career information from across the many silos where this information resides today, ensuring that this information is validated and can be relied-upon, deciding how that data is used by others and even earning revenue on the sharing of their data. For employers and HCM technology vendors, this shift in mindset may initially be uncomfortable, but the benefits will be many, including the ability to rely on trusted, immutable and verified worker data, while driving more effective output from the growing number of AI algorithms we use in HR technology today due to a more comprehensive and accurate view of individuals.
I hope you enjoy this 5-minute talk. Please reach out to me for more information on the topic, on the industry consortium I mention forming around this topic, or just to tell me what you think of this concept or this style of presentation.
Thanks for watching.