Amber Garrison Duncan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), discusses the evolution of competency-based education from seven pioneering institutions in 2013 to over 600 institutions and 1,000 programs today. Drawing from her experience assessing co-curricular learning outcomes in traditional higher education and later as a grantmaker at Lumina Foundation, Garrison Duncan explains how CBE restores the promise of economic mobility by focusing on mastery of skills rather than seat time. She details C-BEN's systems-level work through initiatives like the Center for Skills and the Partnership for Skills Validation, which build consensus across K-12, higher education, and employers on quality standards for skills assessment and validation. The conversation explores how policy shifts like Workforce Pell and state-level innovations in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas are accelerating the movement toward skills-based credentials, financial aid, and talent management systems. Duncan emphasizes the urgency of iterative innovation, comparing the current moment to the iPhone era where institutions must test and adapt quickly rather than waiting for lengthy pilot programs, and offers practical guidance for institutions to begin their CBE journey using C-BEN's Quality Framework while building authentic connections between learning outcomes and employer needs.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces Consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our workforces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: You know, Kaitlin, it feels like just yesterday, but it was actually over a dozen years ago now that we were helping to launch College for America at Southern New Hampshire University, which was one of the very first competency-based education models. And back then CBE, it felt like a radical experiment, you know, trying to prove that demonstrating mastery of competencies and not seat time in a course was the key metric to helping people advance their education and careers.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yeah, it's true. And while it does feel like that was just yesterday, the competency based movement has come so far in so many years. While CBE is still viewed as an alternative, non traditional approach by some in the field of education and training, many institutions have and are continuing to holistically implement competency based models to go beyond the traditional credit hour and ensure a curricular emphasis on what learners can do with what they know, and as we think about the intersection of work and learning in which we're all operating, this movement has only been further strengthened as employers further focus on skills based hiring and learners seek to clearly communicate their skills and abilities in a competitive job market.

Julian Alssid: Yes, and our guest today is with an organization that's been central to growing the CBE field, Amber Garrison Duncan is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Competency-Based Education Network, or C-BEN. In her role, Amber spearheads initiatives to strengthen collaboration between education and workforce partners with a focus on competency and skill taxonomies and quality assurance before C-BEN, Amber spent eight years as a grant maker at Lumina Foundation, focusing on higher education success. And in her early career, she served in numerous Student Affairs roles at the University of Oregon, Florida State University, the University of Michigan, Hope College, and Texas A&M University. Amber, we're so excited to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Well, thank you for having me. It's so exciting to think back to those early days and just also how far we've come. So it's a good moment to reflect. And so thank you for this opportunity.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you for joining us and for taking this moment in time to both reflect, and I guess maybe, you know, we'll spend a little time thinking about what's ahead as well. So I'm really glad to see you today for this conversation. Amber, and as we get started, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and what led you to your role at C-BEN, sure.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Well, as you probably heard in my introduction, I had quite a bit of experience on a couple of campuses in higher ed, and are some of what I would call today our legacy institutions that have been around a long time and really are major leaders when you think about higher education. But in my experience there, I was doing assessment in the co-curriculum, and so I was not working in courses, and I was not working in time based measures. I was working on how students apply what they know and can do? How are they doing that and their co-curricular experiences or at work? And then at the University of Oregon, we were just getting to the point where saying, can we validate this and put it on a record for somebody? And so I was having that experience and also saw how hard it was to do, how much of a change it was to think about. Could people be learning outside of the four walls of this classroom, outside this desk, and where are they taking this knowledge? How would I know? And so from that just knew that also it was a lot of change, and was tired as a change maker, banging my head against the wall. So I said, Where else can I go? This is a systemic issue that, again, I worked at institutions across the country. Why is this so hard? And so then decided to pursue something that could support more of the system's change, and was lucky enough to be at Lumina for that which was a really transformative experience for me to see how the ecosystem is set up, why there's a lot of these incentives and barriers to change. And had the fortune to be leading a portfolio called Learning Infrastructure, and that was a portfolio focused on how we make sure that all high quality learning can count. And I learned there that the only way to maybe do that is, if we were to work in competencies and skills. Other countries around the world were figuring this out. We had to figure it out in the US. And luckily, there were seven institutions that said, Hey, we're already trying this Southern New Hampshire being one of those. And so C-BEN's origin story really is, how do we learn as quickly as possible from these seven institutions. Now that was back in 2013 when we were having that initial meeting and conversation. Today we have over 5000 members. There's no way to track fully and know how many CBE programs there are in the US, but we know there's well over 600 institutions that we know of, over 1000 programs. So it's kind of fascinating when we think about turning the ship in higher ed and how hard that is, and that in just 10 years time, we've gone from those early days to where we are now that really are proving out that CBE is a way to provide greater access. It's a way to ensure mastery, for that every learner gets the quality education and the skills they need. And then employers, again, are very much leaning forward to doing their skills based hiring by connecting with CBE programs. So that's like a quick evolution, and my history is just it's all tied up together in those two pieces. And so once I left Lumina, I just said, I really want to continue to be a part of this and continuing to help lead change. And so now I've been at C-BEN for four years, which, again, time flies, but a lot of really exciting progress to see and be a part of people's stories and watch our community grow.

Julian Alssid: It is quite a quite a story, and you're right in the thick of it, Amber. And so looking back, you know, you mentioned the seven institutions initially. I'm pretty sure we were, we were one of them at College for America.

Amber Garrison Duncan: You were the home of C-BEN at SNHU, yeah.

Julian Alssid: Looking back, what are some of the key moments in the evolution of CBE since those early days that led to the growth we see today? Because it really is quite remarkable.

Amber Garrison Duncan: It is, it is. Also a couple of things, I would say is we also like to remind folks that CBE, if we look at the theory and science of learning this, goes back 100 years. I mean, we all probably, if we came up through education, we're big fans of John Dewey and thinking about all this. And so it's, it's kind of interesting as like, the old ideas that have new ways of implementing and scaling. And I think that was always our problem, as you looked at the movement in the cities, that people really again, University Without Walls, and we're really trying to do this, but again, it's hard to do this without new tools. And our tools of the moment were not really there. And so early leaders, as technology started to be used in higher ed to say, Can we do this async? Can we do this in a more flexible way? Can we, you know, again, recognize what people already know and can do and move them on a personalized pathway, not treat everybody as a cohort and teach them all the same thing at the same time, right? So as we started to see that world move, I think that's where CBE started to take hold, and it was a lot of early online learning institutions saying, hey, let's try this thing out where, yeah, we've got this moving async, and we know we can kind of personalize this. But what if we did this instead of again based on time and a module that, again, it's based on as soon as you master and being able to lift that is, again, it's no small task. But certainly, I think early movers were trying to reach people that they hadn't been able to serve before. They were trying to make sure that, again, what they were asking people to perform and know and do was relevant. Had payoff for those individuals and those residents in the way that we all hope, that it led to family sustaining wages, that, to me, it was about restoring the promise of higher ed that we really are about economic mobility, and we needed to try something new to reach people in ways that we hadn't before. And so that, I think, has been, as I hear over and over those 600 institutions talking about why they're trying to do this is they're trying to reach people who just wouldn't have maybe come to us before, wouldn't have been able to have that learning. And again, they want to make sure that if I ask you to spend that one Pell Grant, you get, or that Workforce Pell piece, or that that's your one shot for a lot of people. And I want to make sure it's worth it to you, and that you get, again, that economic return, and so CBE really is the solution to provide that.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So building off your last comment there Amber, just around, you know, Workforce Pell and where we're headed, right? I mean, we'd love to hear, you know, what are some of the pressing challenges that you see as institutions and organizations seek to work? Work in this complex landscape, and where are there opportunities, especially around, you know, building a skills based ecosystem that involves all these parties, and really not only involves them, but I guess, allows them to collaborate and work together effectively.

Amber Garrison Duncan: You know, I think Workforce Pell is a is kind of a bellwether in the policy incentives and things that will start to shift to reward and make sure that we're paying for things that have, again, return on investments, whether that's, you know, we've been working deeply in Alabama and helping them shift their credentials of value onto what are the skills, not just the labor market demand signal and the but what are the actual skills people need, and how do we make sure those credentials are delivering on those skills, and we're paying for that, not just a completion so again, I think Workforce Pell is starting to lean that way. I think more of the accountability measures are going to be headed that way, and quality assurance being tied to that. So I think that's a huge lever for the work that we're doing, and why people can kind of land on this as a solution to answer that. But again, it comes with a lot of challenges. We are, I say we go everywhere skills go. But if you look at where skills go, it's all the proxies of time that are attached to that, so the credit hour and the just getting into the like, where do I go find a person's skills? Well, I've got to go into the LMS, and I've got to hack the course, and then I've got to hack the assessment platform and the la, la, la, la. And it's like, holy cow. So it's definitely not without challenge. And I do feel like, for the first time, we have again, the market has shifted, and people are starting to say we do need to pay attention to how hard that is. Oh, we do need to say again, should we rethink financial aid based on time and maybe have competency based measures? States again are starting to lead the way in that again Alabama, California. Folks are trying to think about new ways to pay for learning based on skills and competencies and not seat time. We're starting to see Arkansas. Just this morning. I was just reading. They were like, we're not going to call it non credit anymore. It's professional skills learning. And like, why do we again have everything attached to credit? Non credit and hours and time and again. I think that we'll continue to explore, but I do think that it also represents a revisioning of the social contract and thinking about how we pay for things as a society at a moment in time when everything feels very disrupted. But how do we have the forum and the space to talk about what that means, and again, disperse funds, or have policies or have employer engagement in these ways that we all feel comfortable with. And so that's where C-BEN, we're spending a lot of our time. How are we building consensus? How do we reshape a system and not replicate things of the past? As we were getting on, we were talking about, we now have an apprenticeship track at our conference, and we have K-12 coming. And I think now that we're starting to see all these innovators are coming up, looking up and saying, let's not build systems the way that we had them before that we don't like. Let's connect them, because people are trying to move between them. And how do we use skills and competencies to do that? And again, find new ways and new paths in this kind of reimagining using skills as the foundation. And that's what gets me too really excited, but that, again, it's a lot of challenge that we're going to have to face, because now we're talking about admissions policies, and we're talking about dual enrollment, we're talking about things that we have we thought we solved, and now we're figuring out we didn't quite solve them, and we'd like to do better. But that is, is, I think the challenge of where we go next is, how do we build together so that as we're innovating, we don't run past each other, or we don't change one side of the system and not the other. People still need that lifelong learning journey, and we've got to be able to again collaborate to do that.

Julian Alssid: So it really is this big systemic issue, and it sounds like C-BEN has been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and trying to build and scale solutions that cut across the education and employer landscape. You know, I will say, while I agree Workforce Pell's, you know, certainly a bellwether. You know, it's not going to be a lot of money. How do we get solutions that have the employers and educators working in new ways at scale. And what do you guys see being done to advance this? You know, like we want to hear about your, you know, your new Center for Skills and the Partnership for Skills Validation.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Yes, Workforce Pell, it's going to be a small amount, but it is our first dip in something different, right, a little bit, but still tied to the credit hours, so we still have to figure that out. But baby steps, baby steps, it is, it's a baby step, it's a baby step, it is a big baby step. But I certainly, through the Center for Skills, as we are observing, again, this growth. We said, how do we get to the intersection? And so. That's where the Center for Skills really comes in and says, if we're really talking about not just skills, as in, like, what's the sentence that describes skills we're talking about, what are the new types of evidence we need to base these policy decisions on? If we're saying people should be awarded or recognized based on mastery and demonstration of skill, for award of a credential. But we're also seeing again, employers saying, I want to hire people based on that mastery. I want to pay them. We're seeing a couple weeks ago, I was at Walmart and they gathered a lot of their peers, from Home Depot to Best Buy, saying, how do we restructure our performance based talent management structures. How are we incentivizing people? How do we pay people? How do we provide recognition for their skills? That's a huge shift. Again, collectively, for all of us to be having that conversation. But again, we can't just say, What do I slap a label on, but what's the performance evidence? And that's where the Center for Skills is trying to say, let's have that conversation at the intersection of what assessment means at the end of the day, and that our perceptions and the ways that we've traditionally done assessment has to shift and change. All of us, you know, if we're older than 20, probably are used to standardized tests and multiple choice, and those are great knowledge tests. Those are things we know we can do with great rigor and validity and reliability. But what we're talking about now is a new world where things are based on demonstration of skill. It's what I know, it's what I can do. What are the different contexts I can do that in? So it's a much richer, nuanced conversation, and that means we have to have new assessment tools and new ways of understanding that and that we shouldn't, again, back to this concept of like we shouldn't go build those separate from each other. If we're trying to all use the same evidence, how do we agree? How to create that evidence? What does quality look like? So that's really what the Partnership for Skills Validation is driving that consensus from K-12 to gray, employer to here, you know, we just released the common language. How do you just talk about this in the most common way possible, demonstration of skill performance. We're observing people and their behaviors at work, or we're observing people in their learning experience. How do we talk about it? And then again, what does quality look like, and how do we scale it? And that's what we're trying to drive that conversation and be that catalyst for consensus, so that, again, these things don't get created separate from each other, and then they don't work together.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It's really amazing the work you're doing at all these levels, right? The systems it sounds like you're at the systems level. You're at the very tactical level of what does this look like to implement at one institution, or like, how do you change your technical systems to support this work, and then working across stakeholder groups and developing that shared language? I mean, it's an incredible amount of work happening simultaneously. I guess I'm wondering, how do you go about kind of speaking across your own team around some of this learning? Yeah, I imagine you're working at all these different levels and there must be some shared learnings, but also distinct things as well that maybe drive you in directions or directions you didn't expect.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Absolutely. It's like we, I'm just reflecting on we've, we've had to redo our own communications internally because of this, and part of this, I mean, the beauty of our team right now, you know, we talked about the field growing. Our team grew. You know, we had three people three years ago. We're now 25 people and these folks come from, from all the places we're working, right? So we have folks who come from. I built a higher ed program. I was a dean. I'm an instructional designer, I'm a state policy person. So we all have this lens internally that we bring to the problem solving. And so we really are solving it from every angle but, but we have to follow our own advice and internally go, what did you learn from that project? What did you learn? How are we connecting this up? Did you go let so and so, like we learned this from this institution, please go let their state policy maker know, because it is the full systems change and trying to follow and learn from each other as fast as we can, so that we can either reflect that back out to the field or again, help connect people who are trying to solve a common problem and may not realize that they're actually friends in the movement, And they should know each other, and you know, they would go further faster if they were to again resolve the policy barrier at the same time that they're building their program. So it is a unique moment to do that, but it does take just as much to work internally within the organization as it does to push this stuff out and to be able to support people on the ground and in the spaces that they're working. But I think that's unique in that we don't just do policy, we don't just do practice. We are really saying, Where do policy and practice meet, and how do they become truly informing each other over time.

Julian Alssid: Amber, are there particular places where you're finding the most traction in kind of spreading the space? Putting the word and the kind of cross pollination work.

Amber Garrison Duncan: I do think some of the states we've been able to work in have just been tremendous partners to us. Alabama, again, I think, is our most visible support of a full state movement to competencies and skills across the full lifelong of learning, all of that being then represented out in the talent triad so that every employer at every citizen, citizen in the state can participate in a skills based transformation, certainly partnering then with Arkansas and their launch program. But also just, I would be remiss to say KCTCS and our early they were one of the early seven institutions as a system, they continue their great work and and, you know, we just supported the Kentucky CPE (Council for Postsecondary Ed) to build a competency model that takes their K-12 profile of a graduate and extends that up into the associate's degree and the bachelor's degree. So again, you start to see all of these institutions that have been innovating now impacting their systems. You know, we have TBR which has three staff. Tennessee Board of Regents has three staff focused on CBE build out. Those are tremendous amount of change. And again, it shows, I think, a desire to say, how do we solve this on the ground? But we know systems change is hard, and we have to have our systems changing alongside this and working together and just states taking leadership. I will say too, we have a lot of our legacy institutions coming to the fold. University of Kansas, huge leadership in building CBE programs. We just worked with them to launch a research journal for CBE so you could see, even the folks who maybe we wouldn't assume would be at the table, you know, are at the table, University of Nebraska, Lehigh University redesigning their first year experience for engineering students based on competency. So lots of, again, folks coming to the table who you'd be like, oh yeah, I would assume that. But also some folks, you're like, I never would have thought. How cool, you know. So that's pretty fun to see.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's great. I guess you're taking us in this direction anyway, Amber, but I'll ask the question explicitly, what are a few practical steps you would recommend that our audience can take to become forces in supporting the growth of the competency-based education movement. And please feel free to take this question to the systems level, nitty gritty, wherever you want to take it.

Amber Garrison Duncan: We have kind of begun to think about CBE as not just a pedagogy, but a way of thinking about what we do, no matter where we're doing that work. And I think that's why, again, we have folks coming from research to policy to tech to whatever is that? What are we trying to really build? Is that that we want people to be able to engage in a learning experience that is authentic and real and based on what we know about how people learn that's a model, or I want to think about against being so outcomes driven, that whatever I'm asking people to engage in actually gets them where they want to go. And that's where the connection with employers, and it just leads you to this place where you're saying, Where am I the folks I'm serving? Where are they coming from? Where are they trying to go, and what am I putting in the black box here so that they can get there? And that our policies and structures should reinforce that, not again other things that we've used in the past. And so we just are, we'll be releasing a math pathways project where we sat down and said, What is, what do people have to know and be able to do around math today? Well, in that project, it just led us to the faculty, Gen, Ed math faculty, who said, I never sit down with an employer before. I had no idea. That's what nurses did with math today. But because this is an orientation to how we think about learning. We have to start with the employer, and then we're coming back and saying, okay, now that I know that again, what is it that I then help somebody know and be able to do? And how do I shift that? So it really is transformational and just a process of thinking. And then I've said to a friend once, it's kind of like in the matrix, where you're like, You take the blue pill, and you're like, I can't see it. Like, okay, this is how learning should look, and this is how it should happen. Is that it should be relevant to where I'm trying to go again, it should be flexible. Should mean something to me, and it should be applied. And that's, that's what CBE is.

Julian Alssid: So Amber, I've done some poking around the C-BEN side, which looks great, and it's chock full of good information. How can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Amber Garrison Duncan: A couple of things, I would say is one on our website, become a friend of C-BEN. It's free. Gets you to make sure that you have a newsletter and access to a network and community of people who are trying to work on all these issues and problem solve together. So that's a very first easy step, low hanging fruit. And then the second thing I would tell you to start with is look at the Quality Framework. Our Quality Framework is, as far as we know, the only one exists in the world. We have people come globally who say, I found your Quality Framework. We don't have anything like this in Saudi Arabia, or we don't have anything like this in Singapore, or we don't have anything like this. And so we find people starting there and saying, What does quality look like? Because if I'm going to innovate, I want to make sure I'm doing that with quality. And then the other piece, I would say, is take that and then go try to do it in new ways. We always say, too, there's not one way to do CBE, because your learners are different, your employers are different, and that is an okay thing that is that's very hard for us to get out of the mindset of an education where it's like, well, there's a this response and this intervention should look like this, and it's like, that's not we've not found out to be true. And so take that quality framework, try it out, but start somewhere. This is the thing we know. This is a transformative journey. This is not a quick, quick fix. This is an 18 month fix. But once you work that muscle and you start, it's kind of like a workout program. Start the workout program. Just keep going and showing up every day and solving for that next problem, and you will be transformed at the end of it into something that is again, more relevant to learners and employers. And we're seeing enrollments go up. We're seeing great outcomes for individuals, but you have to get on the road, and I would say, the sooner you get on the road, the better. Again, we're not seeing the slowdown. We're actually seeing it accelerate. There are now, again, policy. We're just talking with all the Texas people. Texas legislators passed a House Bill 4848 that said every public system of learning has to have at least one CBE program in certain in-demand fields, and they have to have it in a year. So folks are again, getting on, which is kind of scary. That's scary because that's fast. That's really fast, but I think that is, again, a bellwether of people are tired of the status quo and need something different from us, and so we're going to have to do something so just grab the Quality Framework, get to work, trying some things. Let us know how we can help.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Really appreciate that. Amber, I think you know, I feel like I'm so struck by the number of conversations we have on this podcast that end with, start small, start somewhere. Let's make sure we get going, even if you don't have everything worked out, because if you don't get started, you can never really move the needle or see where the points of pain are, or see where the points of innovation are. So really appreciate that call out. It feels so critical, especially at this moment in time where, yeah, like you're saying, things are moving very quickly.

Amber Garrison Duncan: I always, and this is probably, like, silly, but I always use the example too, of the iPhone in higher ed. We have been so research oriented. Again, I got to try it and pilot it and learn from it for three years. We don't have three years. We have an iPhone moment of get something out there, collect data. Change. Change every six weeks, if you need to. But that is the pace and the urgency of now that is going to require us to work differently. We can't wait for five year program reviews. You better be getting in there with those employers. And in that Alabama example, for the Credentials of Value, we're meeting quarterly to review labor market demand and change updating skill sets. So that's again, when I talk about pace of change, it's going to feel very chaotic, but use your data and insights to ground you and do it more frequently than we've ever done it before.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Amber for this conversation. I mean Julian, I think I think I can speak for us both when I say this topic is very near and dear to our hearts. And you know, we're so excited to have been able to take some time with you to get the current and future state of the field, lay of the land. Really, really appreciate this dialog.

Amber Garrison Duncan: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, and you're always a friend of the movement, you you are. You are the sparks of the movement. So it's been fun to reconnect.

Julian Alssid: Thank you so much, Amber, really, really do appreciate the reconnect.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell, if you're interested in sponsoring the podcast, or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces dot info, forward slash podcast. You can also find workforces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your colleagues and friends, and if you're interested in learning more about workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.