Will a Skills Passport ever get me through the lifelong learning border?: Two critical challenges facing personalised user models for lifelong learning

Abstract

Lifelong personalised learning is often described as the holy grail of the educational data sciences, but work on the topic is sporadic and we are yet to achieve this goal in a meaningful form. In the wake of the skills shortages arising from national responses to COVID-19 this problem has again become a topic of interest. A number of proposals have emerged that some sort of a skills passport would help individuals, educational institutions, and employers to identify training and recruitment needs according to identified skills gaps. And yet, we are a long way from achieving a skills passport that could support lifelong learning despite more than 25 years of work on the topic. This paper draws attention to two of the critical socio-Technical challenges facing skills passports, and lifelong learner models in general. This leads to a proposal for how we might move towards a useful skills passport that can cross the "skills sector border".