As 2025 comes to a close, I hope you’ll pause long enough to truly feel what this community has built together. For myself and Learning Economy, each December carries its own texture: 2022 held promise, 2023 brought growth, 2024 expanded reach, but 2025 did something that felt different. It shifted the ground beneath us. 

The past year didn’t just move the needle, it redrew the map.

Inflection Point: The Lifelong Learning Passport

The year bold belief became shared infrastructure.

On September 21, 2025 during the 80th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly, we launched a stable version of LearnCard, The Lifelong Learning Passport. This was a moment that mattered not because of the room we were in, but because of what it signaled: a visible, global commitment to learner agency, mobility, and dignity.

It’s a passport designed for a simple but urgent purpose: give every person a secure, portable, lifelong record of learning. If a passport enables movement across countries, the Lifelong Learning Passport enables movement across opportunity.

What the Passport Makes Possible

• A single home for lifelong learning: LearnCard allows learners to collect and own their learning records (formal education, online courses, games, community programs, work experiences, and beyond) into a portable, sovereign, learner-controlled wallet.
• Skills clarity in a fragmented world: Using AI, the passport helps learners make sense of what they know and can do. It identifies skills, surfaces patterns, and highlights gaps, turning scattered experiences into a coherent, intelligible skills narrative.
• Pathways, not dead ends: Once skills are visible, the passport can help chart what comes next. Through AI tutoring, localized partners, online learning, apprenticeships, and real job opportunities, learners receive personalized pathways to fill gaps and grow.
• Trusted AI-enabled learning: Supported by the Gates Foundation, the AI Learning Passport enables trusted, personalized learning at scale. By allowing learners to selectively share verified information with AI tools, it ensures guidance is grounded in trustworthy data, not opaque models or probabilistic assumptions. This solves the “cold start” problem while preserving agency, privacy, and dignity.
• A growing ecosystem and app store: LearnCard connects learners to a rapidly expanding app ecosystem—now spanning more than 50 partners—linking education, employment, and support services directly to a learner’s verified skills and goals.

The Lifelong Learning Passport  isn’t just a new product, it’s a signal of readiness, alignment, and responsibility. It’s a shared commitment that learning data belongs to the individual, credentials shouldn’t be locked inside institutional silos, and skills and lived experience should unlock opportunity across borders and systems at all stages of life.

From Vision to Global Public Good

The map only matters if it serves others.

Backed by a growing coalition of foundations, governments, educators, technologists, NGOs, and learners themselves, the Lifelong Learning Passport represents a concrete shift in how learning systems are designed, governed, and shared. Together, partners aim to reach and empower one billion learners by 2030, offering the passport as a global public good that connects education with work, dignity, mobility, and lifelong wellbeing. 

The launch of The Passport marked a pivot away from fragmented credentials toward a learning economy rooted in agency, trust, and human dignity. And why is this such a big deal? Because systems that forget people or treat them as data points cannot sustain or scale democracy.

LearnCard as App & Infrastructure

Inflection points never arrive by accident.

In 2025, LearnCard crossed an important threshold as well. What began years ago as conviction—that learning should belong to the learner—became stable, scalable infrastructure. 

We officially launched LearnCard as a production-ready platform and public good. We supported more than 50 partners globally, shared our work directly with education leaders around the world, and rolled out a durable white label deployment with World Scouting. 

By year’s end, LearnCard has become reliable, durable connective tissue for skills-based education worldwide. We opened doors for learners in ways that simply didn’t exist twelve months ago, and we did it while staying deeply anchored to our north star: making learning sovereign, portable, and universally accessible.

The latest version, which will continue to evolve and improve based on community input, is a secure, accessible, production-ready learner wallet capable of supporting millions. Often described as the Apple Wallet for education or online banking for learning—not because it centralizes power, but because it makes complex systems usable, interoperable, and human-centered at global scale.

This year’s release delivered:

• enterprise-grade stability
• meaningful accessibility improvements
• a refined, intuitive user experience
• seamless cross-partner interoperability
• flexible integration tooling for issuers and verifiers
• A clear community roadmap and robust developer docs

This is what we always set out to build with LearnCard: a sovereign, portable, radically accessible passport that belongs to the learner, but offers intuitive and flexible deployment opportunities for states, nations, and enterprises alike. And just as importantly, 2025 reinforced that simplicity isn’t a technical preference, it’s a practical precondition for dignity at scale.

Pilots & Partners Changing the Game

If the map works, it should work everywhere.

Below is just a snapshot of the projects and partners we supported this past year; early signals of what’s possible when learning infrastructure is built to scale. Alongside these efforts is a growing global partner network that will continue to expand across regions, sectors, and systems. Interested in joining the movement? Let us know!

World Scouting

In 2025, the world’s largest youth-serving organization continued piloting and scaling ScoutPass to document and verify the skills, achievements, and leadership capacities of millions of young Scouts. This is one of the most ambitious youth-credentialing transformations in the world and it’s only just beginning.

Roblox & Robot World

Building on earlier work with LEGO Foundation, and in partnership with leading gaming partners like Filament Games, we launched a holistic experience that transforms Roblox gameplay into interactive curriculum—complete with quests, reflection, and verified learning records, all captured and verified through LearnCard. 

EarthCubs

In partnership with EarthCubs, we launched an integrated experience that helps younger learners explore sustainability through playful characters, simple missions, and creative activities that build early environmental awareness. Learners complete sustainability missions and earn credentials that make planet-saving exciting, entertaining and achievable.

LearningFREQUENCY

In 2025, we deepened our partnership with LearningFREQUENCY, helping learners build metacognition and self-awareness through creative storytelling and personalized “frequency bots.” Learners aren’t just acquiring skills, they’re discovering who they are, what keeps them engaged, and how they learn best.

LIFToFFS Learning (WI)

We established an exciting partnership with CESA (Cooperative Educational Service Agency) #4 and their LIFToFFS Initiative. This exciting work aims to transform education across rural districts through bold, human-centered structural change. By integrating artificial intelligence as Tier 1 instructional support, LIFToFFS enables personalized, inquiry-driven learning that aligns with future-ready skill development and community vitality.

And more than 40 other partners and our generous donors: Gates Foundation, Joan Ganz Cooney Center, LearnerStudio, LEGO Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Young Futures.

You can see a full list of partners here.

The Human Layer: Stewardship Before Scale

Durable systems depend on people who care for them.

In 2025, our network expanded far more than in any year prior. From state governments and school districts, to global NGOs and AI-forward innovators across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. 

We also welcomed new leaders into the LEF family. Dr. Alison Bryant joined us as Chief Operating Officer, Jonny Coreson stepped in to lead Workforce Strategy, Arabella Nyffenegger was named VP of Partnerships, and Duncan Cox stepped into a new role as VP of Product. 

Together we are demonstrating that interoperability isn’t just a technical standard, it’s the bedrock of equity, mobility, and trust.

Strengthening the Technical Core

The work beneath the work.

Behind the scenes were quieter wins that made everything else possible:

• deeper alignment with learning and employment record standards
• a more flexible, plugin-driven SDK architecture 
• improved verification flows and cross-platform support
• expanded issuance, storage, and sharing capabilities 
• accessibility upgrades reaching more learners, in more places

These invisible victories are what allow visible transformation to endure.

What We Built Together

Step back far enough, and the terrain becomes clear.

2025 wasn’t a year of incremental progress. It was a year of structural change to a map we’ve been drawing and redrawing for nearly a decade.

Together, we built:

• a global, sovereign learning wallet
• a universal, lifelong passport for learning
• bridges between education and employment, 
• AI-enabled tools that respect and empower learners
• an ecosystem committed to interoperability, equity, and human agency
• the early architecture of a learning economy designed for people, not just systems

We built momentum. We built trust. We built something meant to outlast us all. At its best, this work doesn’t just open doors—it helps learners recognize themselves, even when no one else is watching. That internal clarity—the trust and transparency in who you truly are—is as important as any salary or external signal.

Looking Toward 2026

A deep breath and purposeful pause. 

As the year winds down, I hope you find time to rest deeply, celebrate loudly, and take stock of how your unique talent and care shaped what we built together. 

When you’re approaching an event horizon with no clear view of what’s on the other side, the only wise move is to lock arms with a humble, capable, and courageous group of allies who are skilled, adaptable, and inexplicably unafraid.

Thank you for the trust, the rigor, the generosity, and the reminder to enjoy each moment before charging up the next hill. It’s an honor to help seed something that will outlive our inboxes, while still making room for wonder along the way.

Here’s to 2026: new states, new partners, new stories, deeper impact, and the same extraordinary community of committed partners at the center of it all—the quiet pride of undeniable progress, and whatever wild and necessary doors 2026 decides to kick open.

As Maya Angelou so beautifully put it:
"There ain't no pay beneath the sun as sweet as rest when a job's well done."  

‍