Why Employers Can’t See the Skills Their People Have and What It’s Costing Them

We live in the age of scalable everything. AI systems can scan thousands of résumés in seconds. Learning and Employment Records (LERs) promise portable, interoperable credentials that follow a person from school to work and beyond. Digital badges, bootcamps, and micro-credentials are growing by the day.

But for all the innovation, we’re still missing one essential ingredient: recognition.

Not just verification. Not just matching. Actual human recognition of where and how people are gaining skills.

Because here’s the truth: you can’t validate what you don’t first see. And right now, we’re failing to see most of the learning that’s actually happening.

The Problem with Scale-First Thinking

The modern skills economy runs on the assumption that if we build faster tools to verify, match, and credential learning, we’ll unlock opportunity for everyone.

But that logic skips a step. Before we can validate learning, we need to know it happened. Before we can build bridges to jobs, we need a map of where people are learning in the first place.

And that’s where our current systems break down.

Millions of Americans are building skills every day through community programs, apprenticeships, mentorship, volunteer work, on YouTube, side projects, job shadowing, podcasts—you name it. But because there’s no consistent way to capture those learning moments, they’re invisible.

We’ve built the back-end of the skills economy without the front-end. The First Mile of Learning Is Still Unbuilt

Why Human Recognition Still Matters

For most of history, learning recognition started with people. A teacher noticing a student’s progress. A supervisor mentoring an apprentice. A peer affirming someone’s skill in action.

We haven’t replaced that with AI—we’ve just digitized around it. But the essential ingredient is still the same: someone notices, names, and values what someone else has learned.

What we need now is a way to scale that recognition, not replace it. That requires a different kind of infrastructure.

What’s Missing: A Front-End for Learning Visibility

Our current skills systems—LERs, hiring algorithms, digital transcripts, badges—work only when they have high-quality, structured data to operate on.

But they don’t tell us where learning begins.

We’re missing the scaffolding that allows frontline learning to be recorded, tagged, and eventually validated. We’re missing the connective tissue that links informal growth to formal recognition.

Until we fix that, even the best credentialing systems will remain incomplete.

How Katch Skills Helps

Katch Skills is building what the skills economy has been missing: infrastructure that captures learning in real time, at the ground level. It tracks, defines, and structures learning moments so they can be recognized—by people, by systems, and by employers.

Katch Skills makes learning visible from the moment it happens. Working with training providers, nonprofits, and employers, Katch helps map the skills people can gain from their programs and makes it simple for participants to log those experiences in real time—through a quick QR scan or

link at an event, podcast, webinar, or workshop.

These entries become part of each person’s learning journal, capturing not just formal trainings but also self-driven growth—like books they’ve read, projects they’ve completed, or skills developed on the job. Katch then structures that data into a dynamic skills profile, giving individuals a clear record of their progress and organizations a real-time view of the capabilities within their teams.

Whether it’s a nonprofit tagging skills taught in their briefing, or a program logging the competencies gained during an apprenticeship, Katch Skills creates a record—a “skill receipt”—that gives informal learning visibility.

Katch Skills doesn’t replace human recognition. It scales it.

Importantly, not all informal learning carries the same weight, and Katch doesn’t treat it as if it does. Instead, it creates structured, timestamped entries that can later be evaluated, verified, and aligned with formal standards where appropriate. It’s a starting point, not a shortcut.

A Lesson from History: The Credit Score Analogy

Before credit scores existed, people with strong financial habits were invisible to lenders. They paid rent, utilities, and informal debts on time, but there was no standardized record to prove it.

Once we built the infrastructure to track that behavior, we unlocked access to capital, housing, and financial mobility for millions.

Katch Skills is doing the same for learning. It creates the foundational layer that turns effort into opportunity.

What About Employers and Credentials?

Katch Skills is not here to replace formal credentials. Degrees, certifications, and verified assessments still play a critical role in many fields, and they should. But they’re not the whole picture.

What Katch Skills does is expand that picture. It helps employers see more of what candidates bring to the table. It gives organizations new data to inform their workforce planning. And it helps individuals connect informal growth to formal opportunity.

In short: it complements—not competes with—the systems already in place.

Conclusion: Opportunity Starts with Recognition

If we want a truly scalable skills economy that can unlock true human potential we need to stop skipping the first step. Recognition is the root. It’s what gives value to learning in the first place.

Katch Skills helps us build that layer. Not with credentials, but with real context. Not by replacing humans, but by giving them better tools to name what matters.

Because the future of work isn’t just about verifying skills. It’s about finally seeing them.