Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations

This is the first post in a series exploring the idea of skills you earn vs. skills you learn.

More than a decade ago, in early 2013, I was working in IBM Research on social network analysis — specifically exploring how the construction and analysis of enterprise graphs could fundamentally shift the value potential of workforce analytics. That work shaped my perspective on the critical and often invisible roles that individuals play within organizations. It led me to question workforce models that focus on individual achievement over collective value, reward the confident extrovert over the productive introvert, and are biased toward self-promotion rather than verifiable contribution.

At that time, I was building something I called Project Breadcrumb that was trying to bring all the disparate digital breadcrumbs of a person’s working life together to get a clear picture of what was really going on across the enterprise. It analyzed systems of engagement, a term that we used in those days to encompass collaboration tools, communication channels, and enterprise social networks, to model how information flows and work gets done across an enterprise. During this project, I kept coming back to the same problem: the most valuable signal about what someone could do was almost entirely invisible to the systems making decisions about them.

The biggest challenge with that idea was always access to trusted, verifiable, contextual data about an individual and their contribution. Back in 2013 this was not an easily solvable problem. The enterprise social graph could tell you a lot about what someone actually did — who they connected with, what knowledge they shared, how central they were to the flow of information across a team. But it was confined to the enterprise boundary. It wasn’t portable. And there was no standard mechanism for a person to carry that evidence with them when they changed jobs, changed sectors, or simply wanted to show a client what they were capable of.

The world of 2026 is a very different place.

Decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, digital wallets, and open standards now give us the technical substrate that wasn’t available then. A cryptographically signed, holder-controlled, standards-based mechanism to carry proof of work across every boundary — employer, sector, program, and border. Not a better database. Not a richer profile page. A different data architecture that allows the person to hold the context of their own life.

Over the coming weeks I want to explore this properly. I want to go back to where it started — the equity argument, the ethics, the privacy philosophy — and connect it forward to what is being built now: career passports, credentialing networks, AI matching implications, and what it means for every worker whose skills are real but invisible.

Skills you earn vs. skills you learn. The idea is the same. The infrastructure just finally showed up.

More soon.

Marie Wallace leads the Digital Identity Innovation practice at Accenture. She has been writing about the human side of data at allthingsanalytics.com since 2011. All opinions expressed are her own.