Taruna Goel

Designed for Learning!: CredX2026: Making Recognition a Verb tarunagoel.blogspot.com/2026/04/credx2… My take from #CredX2026 #CredX #Recogniton #Credentials #Microcredentials #Skills

We don't have a #skills or #credentialing problem, we have a #recognition problem. linkedin.com/posts/tarunago… #RPL #PLAR

I do wonder about how a lot of writing is being produced today...and what kind of writing still requires a human. linkedin.com/posts/tarunago…

We’ll soon find out what is truly special about human writing – psyche.co/ideas/well-soo… via @psyche_the_mag

A Commonwealth Approach to Micro-credential Framework Implementation hdl.handle.net/11599/6129 #Microcredentials #LifelongLearning #HigherEducation #TechnicalVocationalEducationandTraining #TVET #SkillsDevelopment #DigitalBadges #RecognitionofPriorLearning #RPL

Such a great conversation! Worth your time. Naomi Klein & Karen Hao: The Empire of AI and the Fight for Our Future at Chan Centre, UBC youtu.be/Z1B__Efqacc?si…

Lessons from the Far Side of the Moon linkedin.com/pulse/lessons-… #Intelligence #HumanInTheLead #HumanInTheLoop

What a powerful read! "In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing." npr.org/2005/08/08/478…

"A dollar is fungible. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude is fungible. A mass of people bound together by years of shared context, inside jokes and collective memory is not." joanwestenberg.com/communities-ar…

Organisations are not "fungible". “Fungibility” is an assumption that if you redesign an organisation & replace one set of people with a different set, you will still get equivalent outputs. This mistaken belief underlies many organisational restructures: that you can redistribute roles, reporting lines & teams without meaningful loss. I've been reading "Communities Are Not Fungible", a recent essay by @JoanWesten7568. She examines 1960s urban renewal, when planners believed demolishing old neighbourhoods & rehousing residents would allow communities to reform. They didn't. The residents moved. The community did not. A community is not a set of people: it is a historically produced web of relationships between them. Destroy the web, & you have strangers in a building. The parallel to organisational life is uncomfortable. When we restructure, we may preserve many of the people but destroy the relational infrastructure that made them effective. The informal trust that lets someone ask for help. The shared knowledge of who to call when a process stalls. The accumulated understanding of each other's judgment. These live in relationships, not individuals. Redrawing an org chart doesn't transfer them. Research backs this up. Tacit knowledge - the "knowing how" driving real-world performance - depends on trust to flow. Break those relationships & you block the transfer. Studies show informal networks persist along old lines long after formal structures change, creating tension between old loyalties & new mandates. Social capital is the value created by connectedness. It can be destroyed in restructuring & take years to rebuild — a cost that almost never appears in a business case. What leaders can do to protect collective value: 1. Audit informal networks before redesigning formal structures. Use, eg., System Network Analysis or Relational Coordination. Breaking key network nodes causes capability losses no productivity model captures. 2. Treat relational capital as a real cost. Business cases for restructuring rarely account for social capital destruction. Making it visible leads to better decisions & stronger cases for change. 3. Design around high-value relationships. Identify relationships carrying the most trust & history & actively design the new structure to protect them while enabling necessary change. 4. Invest deliberately in building new relationships. Create conditions for them to form through shared work, peer learning & social connection. 5. Give explicit attention to belonging & psychological safety for everyone (not just those who lose or change roles): This creates conditions for the discretionary effort that makes new structures succeed. 6. Slow down at the point of irreversibility. Ask not only "what do we gain?" but "what do we lose - & can we recover it?" The value of an organisation is not the sum of its people's individual capabilities. It is the web of relationships between them. That web is not fungible. Link to Joan Westenberg's essay: joanwestenberg.com/communities-ar…. Thanks to @charlie_psych who sent me the essay.

We are always talking about more courses, more skills, more knowledge. But in practice, growth also comes from subtracting. linkedin.com/posts/tarunago…

The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice. - Brian Herbert

Heading to #CredX2026 at @myVCC on 15-16 April in Vancouver. Looking forward to talking shop on all things #Microcredentials #Badges #Recognition and #IndustryInsights linkedin.com/posts/tarunago…

"Training doesn’t transfer...People transfer...under conditions we create". - John Whitfield #TransferOfLearning #Training #Transfer

Names as the most powerful form of recognition. linkedin.com/posts/tarunago… #RPL #PLAR #Recognition

What is often called as the 'skills gap' is actually a 'recognition gap' i.e. the gap between acknowledging that competence exists outside formal education, and actually building the infrastructure to assess and recognize it. linkedin.com/posts/tarunago…

I finally read @DonaldHTaylor L&D Global Sentiment Survey (GSS) 2026 report last week, and here are some of my thoughts after reading and digesting it! linkedin.com/posts/tarunago…

Where Rigour Meets Relationships tarunagoel.blogspot.com/2026/02/rpl-wh… #RPL #PLAR #Recogniton #Competencies #Learning

It's important to clarify what counts. If we count experience over learning, we may end up validating years instead of validating competencies. Here's my take on why we call "RPL" Recognition of Prior Learning, not Recognition of Prior Experience. linkedin.com/posts/tarunago…

PLAR/RPL is not a shortcut; it's a door that offers an opportunity to recognize & validate competencies. The standards don't change; the path to demonstrate the standard becomes flexible. linkedin.com/pulse/recognit… #RecognizingPriorLearning #PriorLearningAssessmentAndRecognition