The California Career Passport RFP Is Out. And It’s a Game Changer.

California just released the Career Passport RFP, and if you spend a little time with it, you start to realize this is not just another project in the Learning and Employment Records space. It’s a signal. A very clear one. And it says a lot about where this ecosystem is actually heading.

At a surface level, it’s easy to read this as a procurement for a digital wallet. That’s how a lot of people will approach it. But the more you read, the more it becomes obvious that California is not trying to buy a product. They’re trying to build infrastructure. And not just technical infrastructure, but economic infrastructure designed to expand access to opportunity.

One of the most important things they do early in the RFP is frame the problem correctly. This is not about managing credentials. It’s about the fact that too many people have skills, experience, and capabilities that simply don’t show up in the systems employers use to make decisions. When that happens, those individuals don’t just get overlooked, they get filtered out entirely. California is treating that as an infrastructure failure, not a user problem. That’s a big shift.

And when you view the Career Passport through that lens, everything else in the RFP starts to make more sense. This isn’t about issuing more credentials or creating a better place to store them. It’s about creating signals that can actually move through hiring systems in a way that changes outcomes. It’s about making skills visible in a way that employers can understand, trust, and act on.

You also see very clearly that California is not just talking about skills-based hiring in theory. They’re trying to operationalize it. The Career Passport is meant to bring together credentials from across a person’s life, academic records, workforce training, licenses, military experience, and make them usable in real hiring workflows. And importantly, usable for employers who don’t have sophisticated technical teams. The RFP is explicit about that. This has to work in the real world, not just in controlled environments.

Where things get even more interesting is how seriously they take interoperability. This is not the kind of interoperability language we’ve all gotten used to hearing from vendors. This is specific, intentional, and enforceable. They make it clear that proprietary approaches won’t be considered, that credentials need to move across systems, and that solutions need to work regardless of where data originates. That alone is going to be a challenge for a lot of organizations.

But it goes further than that. There’s a line in the RFP that I keep coming back to. They ask respondents to describe how their approach strengthens the ecosystem rather than centers their own platform. That’s not a typical question. And it tells you a lot about how California is thinking. They are not interested in picking a winner. They are interested in building an ecosystem that works.

You see the same level of intentionality in how they think about standards and control. This RFP leans heavily into open standards like W3C Verifiable Credentials and Open Badges 3.0, but more importantly, it reflects an understanding of why those standards matter. The emphasis on things like selective disclosure, privacy, and holder-controlled keys is not accidental. California is drawing a very clear line that this data belongs to individuals, not vendors. That’s going to force a lot of solutions to rethink how they operate.

And then there’s the line that really puts all of this into perspective. Late in the document, almost quietly, they say that the Career Passport is public infrastructure. That one sentence changes everything. Because if this is infrastructure, then it has to outlive vendors. It has to survive changes in standards. It has to remain accessible no matter what happens in the market. That’s a very different bar than most technology projects are built to meet.

When you step back and look at all of this together, what California is doing is not incremental. They are putting a stake in the ground for what a skills-based, data-driven workforce ecosystem actually requires to function at scale. And they’re doing it in a way that reflects a deep understanding of both the technical and systemic challenges involved.

The interesting part is that most organizations will still approach this like a typical RFP. They’ll focus on their product, their features, their roadmap. But that’s not really what this is testing. This is testing whether you understand the system you’re operating in. Whether you can see where the gaps are. Whether you know how to bring together the right pieces to actually make something like this work.

That’s the part that’s hard. And it’s also the part that’s often missing.

When I started Signol Labs, it was based on a pretty simple realization. The biggest challenges in this space are not about building better tools. They’re about making sense of how everything connects. How data moves between systems. How signals get interpreted. Where friction shows up. And how all of that ultimately impacts whether someone gets an opportunity or not.

This RFP is a perfect example of that. It’s well thought out, but it’s also complex in a way that requires more than a technical response. It requires a point of view. It requires context. It requires the ability to step back and see the bigger picture.

That’s where we tend to spend our time. Working with organizations to help them think through how they show up in opportunities like this. Where they’re strong, where they’re not, and how they can bring in the right partners to close those gaps. Not to own the solution, but to help shape it in a way that actually meets the moment.

If you’re looking at this RFP and trying to figure out how to approach it, you’re not alone. It’s a big opportunity, but it’s also a complicated one. And getting it right matters, not just for the outcome of the bid, but for what comes next.

If it would be helpful to talk through your approach, pressure test your thinking, or just make sense of what California is really asking for here, I’m always open to a conversation.

This is a big moment for LERs. And it feels like the beginning of something much larger.