MortarCAPS completes design phase for capability record

MortarCAPS has completed the discovery and design phase of its Human Capability Record, clearing the way for a proposed pilot involving multiple Australian organisations.

The not-for-profit is developing a portable digital framework that would let individuals hold, manage and share verified evidence of their skills, experience, training and professional capabilities. Organisations involved so far include Commonwealth Bank, KPMG, the Australian Computer Society, VTAC, the University of Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney and Western Sydney University.

Cevo and Ingenuity Partners supported the design work, which set out a proposed technical architecture covering trust, digital identity, credential issuance and verification, consent, and participant infrastructure. The model uses a federated approach: individuals and participating organisations retain credential information, while MortarCAPS would operate shared trust services for accreditation, verification and consent.

The design is based on open standards for verifiable digital credentials and proposes AWS infrastructure for the shared trust platform. The work gives MortarCAPS the technical foundation to move into pilot testing across employers, universities and industry bodies.

Consortium model

The initiative has attracted participants from education, industry and technology as it tests whether a common framework can support workforce and education use cases. Alongside the named employers and universities, the broader group includes the Australian Access Federation, Higher Ed Services, CAUDIT, Capability.co and technology partners.

For employers, the project is examining whether trusted capability data could improve workforce mobility, skills recognition and visibility of the skills people build throughout their careers. Potential uses include credential verification, professional accreditation, workforce planning, employee mobility, onboarding and compliance.

The Human Capability Record builds on MortarCAPS' existing data standard for higher education. That standard is used across more than 160 institutions in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, giving the organisation an established base in education data as it expands into portable capability records.

Charlsey Pearce, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of MortarCAPS, said the design milestone marked an important step for the project. "Completing the discovery and design phase is an important milestone for the Human Capability Record. Working with employers, universities, industry bodies and technology partners has helped us turn the concept into a practical design that reflects the needs of the people and organisations that will ultimately use it. We now have a strong foundation for the pilot, including an approach that keeps individual ownership, consent and control at the centre. The next phase is about testing that design with participating organisations and learning what is needed to make trusted, portable capability records work in practice."

Employer interest

Commonwealth Bank is among the employers exploring the scheme as workplace skills and mobility become more prominent issues for large organisations. The bank said its involvement is part of a broader effort to understand how skills can be recognised and shared across different settings.

Jane Adams, Executive General Manager Human Resources at Commonwealth Bank, said: "As work continues to evolve, there's growing focus on how people can build and apply their skills in different contexts. Approaches that make capability easier and safer to share have potential to help support workforce mobility over time, and we're joining the program to explore how this could be designed in a way that is practical, trusted and useful for both individuals and organisations."

Cevo said its role was to help turn the concept into a workable technical design that can now be tested. The company focused on how multiple organisations could participate in a system that enables verification and consent while leaving individuals in control of their information.

"The discovery and design phase has taken the Human Capability Record from a broad ambition to a proposed technical architecture that can now be tested through a pilot. Our work has focused on creating a practical, secure and interoperable design that supports trust between many different participants while keeping individuals in control of their own capability information. With those foundations established, MortarCAPS and the consortium can move into the next phase with a much clearer view of how the HCR could work in practice," said Lewis.