Current studies
What we’re asking the field right now, and what’s coming next.
Fieldwork for The Currency of Credentials is complete and the report is being written. The findings publish on October 1, 2026, and go to everyone on the list before they go anywhere else. The Capability Gap opens for participation later this year.
until the findings are published
The Currency of Credentials
A national study of quality, relevance, and emerging practice in online certification programs — a two-sided, cross-sector look at how these programs actually perform, from the organizations that build them and the people who earn them.
By one 2025 national count, more than 1.8 million credentials circulate across 134,000+ providers: certifications, certificates, microcredentials, badges, and internal programs, often indistinguishable from the outside. Quality is largely self-reported and cross-program benchmarks are scarce. This study asked both sides the same questions and compared the answers.
How programs are built
How organizations design, deliver, assess, and govern their credential programs — and what they believe makes them work.
How they’re experienced
How the people who earn credentials experienced the preparation, the assessment, and the real-world value of what they earned.
Where the two diverge
Where provider intent and learner experience align — and where they pull apart. That divergence is the study’s primary contribution.
What it measured
Four domains, asked of both sides.
Does it match the work?
Whether the credential reflects what the field actually needs — and whether the market recognizes it.
Competence or completion?
Whether the program measures demonstrated competence or simply documents finishing — the distinction the market keeps blurring.
Governed or improvised?
How providers govern AI in content and assessment — and how learners used it to prepare.
What it’s worth
What the credential does for the organization that issues it and the person who earns it.
Participation was voluntary and confidential. Responses are reported in aggregate only; no person or organization is identified without explicit permission.
The Capability Gap
A national study of how organizations build AI capability — how the people using these tools every day came to be good at it. Not what was purchased, and not where anyone expects to be in three years.
There is a great deal published on spending and intent, and remarkably little on the learning itself: what gets taught, who teaches it, and what capable use looks like once the training is over. Organizations are solving this in genuinely inventive ways, most of which have never been written down. That’s the gap this study fills.
What is AI here to do?
Whether a specific problem, decision, or use case has been named — as distinct from having the tools.
How use meets policy
Whether AI runs through training, governance, and approved workflows, or comfortably alongside them.
Built from the real work
Whether preparation draws on the organization’s own workflows, knowledge, and constraints — or arrives off the shelf.
What changed day to day
Whether the plan became workshops, playbooks, tools, and workflow changes that people actually use.
The four domains come from the C.A.L.M. AI Navigator™ framework. Participation takes about five minutes, with a few optional open-ended questions at the end, and is anonymous by design — responses and contact details are collected in separate systems that cannot be joined. Organizations that have done nothing yet are explicitly welcome; their experience is a substantial part of what the study is for.
Participants receive the benchmark report before public release, along with a placement of their own organization against the cohort.
A commissioned study with Facti Machina.
In the first quarter of 2027 we field a study commissioned by Facti Machina, a financial research systems firm. Commissioned work is scoped with the client and owned by them, which makes it a different animal from the studies we initiate and publish ourselves — the distinction is set out in how we research.
Scope, participant criteria, and publication terms will be posted here as they are settled.
Who it’s for
Built for the people who have to decide.
The findings are written for the people holding the decision, not for an academic audience — short enough to read, specific enough to act on, and honest about what the data does and doesn’t support.
The findings
Read it before it’s public.
The Currency of Credentials publishes October 1, 2026. Subscribers receive it first, along with notice when The Capability Gap opens for participation.
Want this run on your own program? A matched study can be commissioned directly — see research engagements, or how we research.