A recent Fast Company article explored whether upskilling is truly effective for job seekers and for individual employees looking to accelerate their personal development. While many jobseekers debate the usefulness of upskilling in actually helping to secure their next role, one example clearly stood out.
A London-based product manager at a predictive hiring company, Applied, took AI learning courses through Coursera and then verified their skills on Workera, placing in the 75th percentile. Once she put this verified upskilling on her LinkedIn, she immediately received a handful of company and recruiter inbounds for open roles that fit the skills she acquired. Notably, she secured her new role at Applied via a combination of higher education and online upskilling courses in behavioral economics.
Verified skills made all the difference for this one manager, demonstrating their capacity to transform job searches, personal development, and even internal project staffing. While Workera is waiting to relaunch our free consumer experience with our AI agent, enterprises today use the platform to provide employees with verified skills assessments that accelerate internal mobility.
And they’re not alone. Deloitte found that organizations adopting skills-based models are nearly twice as likely to place talent effectively and retain high performers. According to McKinsey, “hiring for skills is 5 times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education and 2 times more predictive than work experience.”
With the right tools, it’s easier than ever to demonstrate and verify skills. Below we’ll explore how verified skills are becoming the linchpin for modern job searches and internal progression.
Pivoting from resumes to confirmed capabilities
What are verified skills, and what do they mean for candidate evaluation? Verified skills represent an objective assessment of someone’s true capabilities — it’s credible, demonstrable, and tied to specific use cases. A hiring manager can confidently depend on the candidate to complete certain tasks relevant to the specific role they’re trying to fill.
Compare this dependability to how job applications have historically worked. Candidates draft a personal resume or CV to describe skills or experiences — essentially asking a hiring manager to take them at their word. Hiring managers have no way to confirm what skills a candidate truly has, how those skills are demonstrated in their experiences, and how that can meaningfully transfer to the role being filled. Hiring often devolves into a keyword-matching exercise, leaving managers with little evidence of how well or how quickly candidates can deliver.
Verified skills improve the process for hiring managers and candidates alike by providing an unbiased evaluation of capabilities, benchmarked against thousands of learners.
Using verified skills in your next job search
Verified skills can help candidates cut through the noise of an increasingly crowded job market.
Here are two examples of how candidates can use targeted skills verification to advance their career:
- Upskilling high-value areas adjacent to areas of expertise. “AI+ X” employees — those who have mastered AI in addition to deep subject matter expertise — are extremely valuable to enterprises across industries.
- Validating experiences referenced on a resume or CV. If a candidate has extensive experience coding in Python, for example, they can quickly verify those skills to add credibility to their CV. Their application moves beyond a list of relevant keywords to a demonstrable skill overview.
The most valuable employees are those marrying deep expertise with emerging technologies. Candidates who can verify both their domain expertise and their fluency in AI stand out as future-ready hires.
Verified skills shift an application from words on paper to actionable proof of ability — a transition that can make the difference between being overlooked and getting an interview. But the value of verified skills doesn’t end once a candidate lands a role. Their impact extends inside organizations as well.
Building mobility within an enterprise
Upskilling cannot be just a reactionary process for those looking for a job. The strongest employees, candidates, and leaders are perpetual learners. This mindset creates resilience — the ability to adapt quickly to new roles, new tools, and new organizational priorities.
Even if you’re not looking to switch jobs, verified skills can unlock new pathways inside your current company. They can help you raise your hand for projects you might otherwise have missed, strengthen your case for a promotion, or highlight untapped expertise to leadership. Research from Deloitte found that organizations with strong internal mobility programs retain employees twice as long as those without. Verified skills give employees and managers a common language to identify and deploy talent where it’s needed most.
The most valuable employees aren’t those who have already demonstrated expertise — they’re the ones who learn the fastest. Verified skills make that learning visible. They allow individuals to showcase growth while helping organizations identify who’s ready for the next challenge.
Verified skills matter
As the pace of change accelerates, resumes alone can’t keep up. Verified skills are the new currency for employability, mobility, and credibility — both in the external job market and inside organizations.
For employees, they cut through noise and signal readiness for the jobs of today and tomorrow. For employers, they provide a clearer, fairer, and faster way to identify talent.If you’re a learning and development leader, verified skills are one of the most effective ways to future-proof your workforce. Schedule a demo with our team to see how Workera helps enterprises provide employees with verifiable proof of capability — unlocking mobility, retention, and readiness for what’s next.
