ABOUT THE SESSION
- Tuesday, 29 September 2026
- 10:45AM EDT (Day 2)
- Event type: In-Person
- Canadian War Museum, Ottawa
Identifying and Making Skills Visible in All Areas of Life
Identifier et rendre visibles les compétences dans tous les contextes de vie
Australia and Canada are making the same bet. Both have launched national AI strategies. Both are funding courses, digital literacy and new competency units at scale.
Both are building the training pipe. Neither has finished the signalling pipe.
Productivity doesn’t move because people learn new skills. It moves when the labour market can see those skills, trust them, and act on them. Right now the signals we rely on – degrees, job titles, résumés – are getting noisier at exactly the moment they need to get sharper.
Margo Griffith and Don Presant compare how both countries are approaching skills recognition, where the recognition infrastructure is falling behind the training infrastructure, and where capability already exists but stays invisible: newcomers with unrecognized credentials, Indigenous learners, older workers, rural and remote communities.
They’ll close with what a working signalling layer actually requires – and what’s already being tested across pilots in Canada and Australia.
SESSION TIME: Tuesday 29 September, 10:45 AM EDT at the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Margo Griffith
Principal Skills Consultant, SkillsAware
Margo’s in-depth knowledge and experience of skills, the skills ecosystem and digital credentials is the result of working in and with higher education providers and edtech leaders, nationally and internationally for 30+ years. She is passionate about the positive impact of technology within education and the enablement of lifelong learning, learner agency and mobility.
Margo is a convenor of the Australian micro-credentials Network and consults with the Government, industry, and education sectors on a skills-first approach to learning and the workforce.
Her recent publications include “Creating the University of the Future: A Global View on Future Skills and Future Higher Education” (Contributor) (Springer 2024), “Technology Enablement of the Skills Ecosystem” Naomi Rose Boyer and Margo Leanne Griffith (International Journal of Information and Learning Technology ISSN: 2056-4880, 2023) and “Mapping the STEM Microcredential Landscape, Volume II” (Contributor) (Springer 2026) Naomi Rose Boyer and Margo Leanne Griffith.
Don Presant
President, Learning Agents
Don Presant is a recognition advocate, consultant and service provider with more than 25 years of experience in educational technology and lifelong learning. He is the Founder and President of Learning Agents, a Canadian consultancy focused on helping organisations make skills, learning and achievement more visible through digital credentials, Open Badges, micro-credentials and Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL).
A long-time advocate for Open Recognition, Don works across formal, non-formal and informal learning to develop flexible approaches to recognising skills and achievements acquired throughout work, education and life. Through Learning Agents, he also supports CanCred.ca, a Canadian digital badge and micro-credential platform.
Don is a founding member of the international Open Recognition Alliance and co-author of the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration. His work spans digital credential strategy, ePortfolios, RPL/PLAR and skills recognition, with a particular interest in creating recognition systems that are transparent, portable and fit for purpose.
