What is a Skill Passport?

A Skill Passport in one sentence

A Skill Passport is a verified profile of what a person can actually do — their competencies, the evidence behind each one, and credentials an employer can independently check.

Unlike a CV, which is self-reported, a Skill Passport is built from assessment results, so the claims it makes are measured rather than asserted.

What's inside it

Each competency carries a score that rolls up from the assessments a person has taken, a confidence band that grows as more evidence accumulates, and a trend showing whether the skill is improving over time.

The competencies are not free text. Each one is a defined entity with its own public definition, behavioural indicators at three proficiency levels, and the observable signals that it is missing — the whole set is published in the AssessAll Capability Framework, so a passport score points at a definition anyone can read rather than at a private rubric.

Where an assessment leads to a credential, the passport links to a verification page that anyone can open without logging in — so a recruiter can confirm the result is genuine.

What 'verified' actually means, technically

A shareable link that displays a result is not verification: it proves only that a page on our website says something. Since 31 August 2026 every credential AssessAll issues is also emitted as a cryptographically signed Open Badge — an Open Badges 3.0 credential, which is a W3C Verifiable Credential 2.0 under the 1EdTech specification, signed RS256 in the JWT proof format the standard requires.

The practical consequence is the point. A signed credential can be checked by any third-party Open Badges or Verifiable Credentials verifier without trusting assessall.com at all: the verifier fetches our public key from a did:web document at the domain, checks the signature, and checks the credential against a published 1EdTech revocation list. If we later revoked the badge, or if a single character of the credential were altered, that check fails.

Two design choices are worth knowing because they affect the person, not the employer. The recipient identity inside a public credential is a salted hash rather than an email address, so a credential can be posted publicly without publishing the holder's contact details while still matching against an email a verifier already has. And signing keys are versioned, so credentials issued under an older key keep verifying after a key rotation.

The standards underneath it — and the one claim we are not making

Two things happened in the standards world that make a portable skills record more than a vendor feature. The W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 family of specifications became a full W3C Recommendation on 15 May 2025 — a finished standard, not a draft — which means the data model a credential is expressed in is now stable and implementable by anyone. And Open Badges 3.0, the 1EdTech specification AssessAll issues to, is aligned to that VC 2.0 data model, so an AssessAll credential is a Verifiable Credential in the ordinary standards sense rather than in a marketing sense.

Here is the part a buyer should press on, and where an honest answer distinguishes vendors. 1EdTech runs a formal conformance certification programme for Open Badges 3.0, with separately certifiable roles — Issuer, Displayer and Host — requiring membership and a pass on the published conformance test suite. Certification is externally attested: you can ask a vendor for it and check it. AssessAll is not currently 1EdTech-certified. We implement the specification, sign with RS256 in the JWT proof format the standard requires, and publish a resolvable key and revocation list, so any third-party verifier can check our credentials without trusting us — but implementing a specification and being certified against it are different claims, and only one of them is somebody else's word. Ask every vendor which of the two they mean.

The direction of travel is worth knowing when you choose where evidence lives. The EU Digital Identity Wallet, established by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 of 11 April 2024 amending eIDAS and in force since 20 May 2024, requires Member States to offer citizens a wallet — the Commission's own timeline says by the end of 2026 — and its recitals name academic qualifications and other educational or professional entitlements among the attestations it is designed to carry. A skills record that is already a standards-conformant verifiable credential is positioned for that; a PDF and a shareable link are not.

What a verified credential does not prove — and the number that cannot travel with it

Verification answers one question completely and a different question not at all. A signed credential proves the result is genuine: that this person sat this assessment, that we issued this claim, and that nobody has altered it since. It does not prove the result is comparable to anyone else's, and those are separate properties that a single badge on a profile can easily blur.

The clearest case is the percentile. Where AssessAll reports one in a hiring pipeline it is a cohort percentile, computed against the other scored candidates in that same pipeline on the standard percent-at-or-below definition. It is not a national norm, an industry norm or a global benchmark, because no AssessAll instrument has yet met the internal gate for publishing one — 400 completed sittings on a single form, from at least ten organisations, with no organisation above a quarter of the sample.

Which means the percentile is a property of the pipeline, not of the person, and it does not travel. The scoring code makes that literal: a cohort percentile is only computed at all when more than one candidate in the pipeline has a scored result, so for a single candidate assessed alone there is no percentile to report. A passport that carried one out of its pipeline would be quoting a rank against a comparison group that no longer exists.

So what a passport carries forward is the competency score, the band, the evidence behind it and the date — quantities that mean the same thing wherever they are read, because they point at a published definition and its level anchors rather than at a position in someone else's applicant pool. When a recruiter asks what a number is out of, that is the honest answer, and it is a better one than a percentile with no named norm group.

Why it matters for hiring and learning

For employers, a Skill Passport shortens screening: instead of guessing from a CV, they see measured competencies relevant to the role.

For learners, it turns scattered assessment results into a single, growing profile they own and can share — on AssessAll, that profile updates automatically every time they complete an assessment.

It also survives the platform. A credential that verifies against a public specification, a public key and a public revocation list keeps its meaning in any system that reads the standard, which is the difference between a portable record and a page on a vendor's website.

What a Skill Passport is not

It is not a qualification or an accreditation. AssessAll issues its own credentials against its own published framework; it is not an awarding body and does not hold an educational accreditation.

It is not a substitute for judgement in hiring. A measured competency score is one input alongside interviews, work samples and references, and behavioural profiles in particular should inform how you work with someone rather than whether you hire them — see what a psychometric assessment measures for where each instrument family belongs.

And it is only as good as the evidence in it. A single assessment gives a competency a wide confidence band; the band narrows as more, and more varied, evidence accumulates. A passport with one result behind a score is showing you a first estimate, and it says so.