Skill trajectories, across age, not just across cohorts

Pass rates are a necessary public number and a poor description of a life. We now follow candidates across age groups, asking which skills stayed, which rusted, and which had to be re-examined because the tool underneath them changed.

Older adults who certified in Computing Literacy often kept the safety habits and lost confidence in interfaces that had been rearranged. Younger candidates in data roles kept the scepticism and needed a refresher when the export format changed. AI Fluency decayed fastest where a workplace banned practice and then expected mastery.

The study is unfinished, which we prefer to a premature victory. A longitudinal claim that arrives in the same year as the cohort is a press release.

What we will say: a certificate is a point on a trajectory. The network’s job is to make the next point available, including for people who certified with us in 2012 and are back because the work changed.