Call for Contributions: PLAIO #10

PLA as a Strategic Key to Human Resource and Sustainable Labor Market Development

What if we stopped asking people to prove themselves through what they lack, and started recognizing them for what they already offer?

What if the labor market no longer revolved around fixed qualifications, but around the living, evolving capabilities of people?

Across the world of work, a transformation is unfolding. Occupations shift, careers fragment, skills are redefined, and learning escapes the boundaries of classrooms and institutions. Yet our systems of recognition often remain static, formal, and exclusionary. Too much talent remains unseen. Too many experiences remain undervalued.

Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) — also known as Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), Validation of Prior Learning (VPL), Validation des Acquis de l’Expérience (VAE), Recognition of Current Competencies (RCC), and many other terms used across the world — challenges this reality at its core.

PLA is not just a tool. It is a different way of seeing. It is a way of recognizing that learning is everywhere. It is a way of valuing human potential as it is lived, not only as it is certified. It is a way of connecting people’s experiences to meaningful opportunities in work, learning, and in their communities.

For the 10th issue of PLAIO, we invite contributions that help us understand and respond to this shift—not as a technical adjustment, but as a paradigm change.

We are looking for research, theories, discussions, case studies, concrete examples, and resource materials that explore and support how PLA can become a strategic force in shaping human resource development and sustainable labor markets. These contributions may share new approaches; address controversies, debates, or tensions in the field; provide insights into what has worked and not worked; or illuminate pathways for scaling PLA as a sustainable and equity-centered workforce strategy. We welcome cross-sector and cross-national perspectives that broaden our collective understanding of PLA's evolving role, as well as explorations of the conditions under which PLA policies and practices most effectively advance both individual opportunity and systemic workforce resilience. We are equally interested in bold new frameworks that envision how PLA might reshape the future of work and learning, positioning it as a catalyst for equitable workforce transformation.

This issue of PLAIO seeks to acknowledge, analyze, and engage the full complexity of this terrain, embracing the tensions and possibilities that make this such timely and consequential work — because grappling with difficult and meaningful questions, and inviting contributors to join us in that effort, is precisely how a field grows.

Here are some questions to consider:

On Recognition and the Labor Market

• How can PLA systems move beyond individual credentialing to become genuine drivers of labor market reform? What structural conditions need to change for this to happen?
• How can we capture emerging occupations, where recognition anticipates and shapes formalization, creating space for new definitions of work and expertise?
• In what ways do current qualification frameworks enable or constrain the recognition of non-formal and informal learning? What would a more dynamic, capability-based framework look like?
• How does PLA intersect with evolving definitions of “work” in gig economies, platform labor, and hybrid professional environments?

On Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice

• Whose knowledge counts, and who decides? How do PLA systems risk reproducing the inequities they seek to address, and how can they be redesigned to do otherwise?
• What can PLA offer to migrants, refugees, and displaced workers who carry significant expertise but lack documentation? What barriers remain, and how are they being overcome?
• How do intersections of race, gender, class, and geography shape access to—and outcomes of—PLA processes?

On HR and Organizational Practice

• How are forward-thinking organizations embedding PLA principles into talent management, workforce planning, and cultivating potential? What does this look like in practice?
• What role can PLA play in succession planning, internal mobility, and the retention of workers whose skills are growing faster than their job titles?
• How can HR professionals and PLA practitioners build shared languages and mutual trust across their fields?
• How could tailored-personalized learning be incorporated, where pathways grow from the individual rather than forcing the individual into predefined routes?
• How can career guidance and career management processes use learning recognition to help individuals grow their potential?

On Policy and Systemic Change

• What national or regional policy frameworks have been most effective in integrating PLA into lifelong learning and workforce development strategies? What can others learn from these?
• How can PLA be embedded into sustainability agendas—not only as a workforce tool but as a means of building socially resilient communities?
• What is the relationship between PLA policy and broader debates about the future of education, automation, and the social contract?

On Methodology and Innovation

• How are digital portfolios, micro-credentials, and AI-assisted tools reshaping the landscape of prior learning assessment? What opportunities and risks do these AI-tools introduce for assessing work-based learning?
• What new methodologies—narrative, arts-based, participatory, or otherwise—are being used to surface and assess experiential knowledge? How do these forms of recognition challenge traditional systems of assessment? In what ways are they effective in capturing workplace learning?
• How do we assess the quality and validity of PLA processes themselves? What frameworks, standards, or ethics guide the field?

We invite both voices that describe and analyze practice and voices that focus on policy:

• Bottom-up contributions that show how recognition is enacted in real lives, real workplaces, real encounters.
• Top-down reflections that question and redesign the systems, standards, and professional attitudes that enable—or constrain—recognition.

This issue is an invitation to rethink the foundations of our labor market. Transformation does not happen in isolation. It happens where experience meets structure, where agency meets opportunity, where recognition becomes a shared practice. But above all, we invite contributions that create dialogue between practice and policy, between the people whose learning is being recognized and the systems charged with recognizing it.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this upcoming issue of PLAIO. Questions can be directed to any of our editors: Carl Burkart, Ruud Duvekot, Susan Forseille, Alan Mandell, or Nan Travers. (carl.Burkart@SUNYEmpire.edu; SForseille@tru.ca; rdu@cl3.nl; alan.mandell@Emeritus.SUNYEmpire.edu; nantravers@me.com)

We look forward to your submission by 15 October 2026.

All submissions should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents to Alexa.Collesides@SUNYEmpire.edu.