Certification Is the Word That Makes Skills Passports Work — And It’s the One the CPD Sector Can’t Yet Promise

Think of a passport — a real one. The reason it gets you across a border isn’t the navy cover or the gold lettering. It’s that an issuing authority stood behind every page, checked who you were, and put its name to the claim. Strip out that verification and you’re left with a nicely bound booklet that means nothing. A Skills Passport is exactly the same. It’s only as valuable as the trust behind each entry — and trust, it turns out, is the thing the skills system is now wrestling with hardest.

This post looks at what Skills England is actually building, why “verification” has emerged as the make-or-break principle, and where the recording of non-regulated learning — CPD, short courses, micro-credentials — fits into all of it. If you’re a training provider, an employer, or a professional trying to make sense of where this is heading, this is the part of the conversation that matters most.

The government isn’t building a platform — it’s building the rules

Here’s the first thing most people get wrong about the Skills Passport. They picture a government app. A single website where everyone logs their learning. That’s not the plan at all.

Skills England has been clear that its job is to set standards, not to run the one true platform. The approach being discussed draws a direct parallel with Open Banking — the framework that lets your banking apps securely talk to one another because every provider follows the same agreed rules. Skills England has confirmed it is continuing to gather evidence about skills passports and will publish a paper in 2026 setting out what it has found and identifying where government can add the greatest value.

Why does this matter? Because in a standards-based model, the government doesn’t personally check every credential. It sets the rules that everyone else’s platforms must meet. And that puts enormous weight on getting those rules right — particularly the rules about what counts as a verified, trustworthy entry.

It’s worth remembering why Open Banking actually works. It isn’t open season. Third parties have to be authorised and meet regulatory requirements before they can access the system, with ongoing compliance monitoring and enforcement. There’s a gate. The Skills Passport will need one too.

Practical tip: If you run a training platform or recording tool, start tracking the Skills England standards work now rather than waiting for it to land. The organisations that thrive under Open Banking were the ones already building to the published standards before compliance became mandatory.

“Verified” and “trusted” keep showing up — and that’s no accident

Sit in on the conversations happening around the Skills Passport and two words come up again and again: verification and trust. They’re not buzzwords. They’re the whole game.

The logic is almost embarrassingly simple, and it’s the point I’ve made directly in this process: if credentials and skills are properly verified, that creates trust in the Skills Passport. Take the verification away and the entire structure wobbles. An employer who can’t trust an entry will ignore it. A jobseeker whose genuine achievements sit alongside unverifiable ones gets tarred with the same brush. The passport becomes a glorified CV — self-reported, unchecked, easy to inflate.

The sector itself has reached the same conclusion. In its consultation response, Independent Higher Education argued that a well-designed skills passport could provide a verified, portable and up-to-date record of skills gained across education, work-based learning and continuing professional development — improving employer confidence in recruitment and workforce planning. Notice the order: verified comes first, because everything else depends on it.

A skills system only works when it’s coherent — when a credential earned in one place is trusted everywhere else. And coherence is impossible without trust, which is impossible without verification. The three are a chain.

Practical tip: Whatever credential you issue or hold, ask one question of it: can a stranger check this is real, quickly, without taking my word for it? If the answer is no, it won’t carry weight in a verification-first system — however impressive it looks.

The part of the system nobody’s verifying

Now for the gap. And it’s a big one.

Regulated and academic qualifications already have verification built in. A degree, an A-level, an Ofqual-regulated qualification — these flow through awarding bodies, universities, and statutory oversight. When a Skills Passport records them, there’s an established chain of custody behind the claim. That problem is, broadly, solved.

But a huge volume of what people actually learn across a career sits outside that framework. CPD. Short courses. Micro-credentials. Informal professional development. This is the learning that keeps a nurse current, a tradesperson certified, a solicitor compliant — and almost none of it has the verification infrastructure that regulated qualifications enjoy.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. The “CPD accredited” label carries real commercial and professional weight, yet the sector issuing it is entirely unregulated. There is no Ofqual for CPD. Anyone can set up a CPD accreditation organisation tomorrow, with no oversight, no mandatory standards, and no one checking their work. The number of such organisations has grown from a small handful a few years ago to well over ninety today — and a significant share have serious questions hanging over their independence and rigour. The Advertising Standards Authority has already upheld complaints against several for misleading claims, confirming these issues form part of a wider investigation into CPD accreditation services.

So if a Skills Passport simply waves through any credential carrying a “CPD accredited” stamp, it imports that entire trust problem — at national scale, with the implied endorsement of a government framework behind it.

Practical tip: If you’re a professional logging CPD, keep the evidence behind each activity — who accredited it, what the learning outcomes were, proof of completion. In a verification-first world, the activity you can substantiate is the only one that will count.

Verification at source beats filtering after the fact

There are two ways to deal with untrustworthy credentials. You can let everything in and try to filter out the bad stuff afterwards — a losing game, as anyone who’s fought spam will tell you. Or you can verify at the point of issue, so only sound credentials enter the system in the first place.

The Open Banking model chose the second approach, and it’s the right instinct for skills too. You don’t admit every bank and then monitor for fraud; you authorise institutions against a standard before they can participate. Applied to CPD, that means the question isn’t “is this certificate genuine?” after it’s already in someone’s passport. It’s “is the organisation that accredited this learning itself credible and independent?” — asked at the source.

This is precisely the gap The CPD Register was built to fill. As the UK’s only IPO-Certification Body setting quality standards for CPD accreditation organisations — backed by registered certification mark UK00004068444 — its function is to verify the verifiers: to certify which CPD accreditation organisations actually meet genuine, independent standards. That’s the missing link for non-regulated learning. Not a competitor to the Skills Passport, but a contribution to the one piece the regulated-qualifications system doesn’t already cover.

And these aren’t observations from the sidelines. The CPD Register contributed evidence to Skills England’s skills passport consultation, and we’ve taken part in its early insight sessions — and verification and accreditation are squarely among the themes emerging from that work. The conclusions are Skills England’s to draw, but the principle that non-regulated learning needs its own verification gate is, I’d argue, unavoidable.

Practical tip: Training providers — check now whether your CPD accreditation comes from a genuinely independent, certified body or one that simply sells a badge. When verification standards arrive, that distinction will separate the credentials that travel from the ones that get quietly ignored.

What this looks like in practice

Principles are easy to state and hard to operate. So it’s worth grounding all this in something real.

CPD Passport — the platform The CPD Register launched in October 2025 — exists partly to prove the verification-first idea actually works for professionals day to day. It gives individuals a portable record spanning their regulated qualifications, professional certifications, and CPD, with verified activities linked directly back to The CPD Register’s accreditation register so authenticity can be confirmed rather than assumed. Controlled, time-limited sharing lets a professional show an employer, regulator, or insurer exactly what’s needed, for exactly as long as needed.

The point isn’t the platform itself — Skills England’s whole approach is that many platforms should align to common standards, not that one should win. The point is what running it has taught us: that individual ownership, verification at source, and low-friction sharing aren’t theoretical nice-to-haves. They’re what makes people actually use the thing, and what makes employers actually trust it. That operational evidence, alongside the doctoral research our R&D lead Emma Owen is conducting with Middlesex University into CPD quality and skills infrastructure, is what we’re able to bring to the wider conversation.

Practical tip: Whether you adopt CPD Passport or any other tool, judge it against the emerging national direction: individual-owned, verification-backed, portable, and built to share securely. Those are the features that will age well.

Where this leaves you

Strip everything back and the story is straightforward. Skills England is building the rules for a national Skills Passport, not a single government app. The principle doing the heavy lifting in that work is verification — because trust flows from it, and the whole system collapses without it. Regulated qualifications already have that verification; non-regulated learning like CPD largely doesn’t. And closing that gap means verifying credentials at source, by certifying the bodies that issue them — not waving everything through and hoping to clean up later.

The encouraging part is that the sector is converging on this. The verification-trust link isn’t a hard sell any more; it’s becoming the consensus. The work now is to make sure that when the standards are written, non-regulated learning isn’t treated as an afterthought — because for millions of professionals, CPD is the learning that keeps them current and employable.

A Skills Passport that people can trust could genuinely reshape how this country recognises skills — opening doors for career-changers, school-leavers, and everyone whose talent has never fit neatly onto a CV. That’s a future worth building properly. And building it properly starts with a single, unglamorous, non-negotiable word: verified.

If you want to understand what credible, independent CPD verification actually looks like, that’s exactly what we do at The CPD Register.