Jeremy McQuigge, Secretary-General of the Council Advancing Work-Based Learning (CAWBL), will attend the Transforming Global Education Summit at the United Nations this May as a delegate contributing to international conversations on the future of education systems.

This invitation places work-based learning into a global dialogue about how societies recognize knowledge, participation, and contribution across communities, economies, and cultures.

Learning Begins in Contribution

For many people, learning does not begin in classrooms. It begins in contribution.

It begins in families, communities, cultural practices, places of worship, and workplaces. It grows through responsibility, problem-solving, and participation in everyday life. People develop knowledge because they must respond to real situations and real needs.

This understanding shaped the work that followed.

Over the past several years, Jeremy helped establish a set of infrastructures designed to make learning through contribution visible and usable across systems:

–The Work-Based Learning Numbering System (WBLNS™), the first indexing system for learning through contribution,
–PathLedger™, a public ledger for recording validated contribution,
–The Council Advancing Work-Based Learning (CAWBL),
–Praxis: The Work-Based Learning Journal

Together, these initiatives support a shared goal: making visible what has always existed but has not yet been recognized clearly across institutions and jurisdictions.

Education as Global Infrastructure

The Transforming Global Education Summit focuses on a central question: how should we understand education as global infrastructure?

Work-based learning (WBL) contributes directly to that conversation because it recognizes that knowledge already exists across workplaces, communities, and civic life. At the same time, WBL needs trusted infrastructure that allows individuals and organizations to capture, verify, and carry that learning forward.

As a result, the Summit creates an important opportunity to explore what education systems could look like if they started from where learning actually happens rather than from where learning is traditionally delivered.

Jeremy will bring this question to New York while representing CAWBL and the broader field of work-based learning. At the same time, he will listen closely to partners working across international recognition systems, workforce mobility initiatives, and learning infrastructure development.

Because the system we are working to make visible is not new. It is already here. We simply need better ways to see it.

Find out more about the Summit

Interested in how CAWBL contributes to global conversations on learning recognition and education infrastructure? Connect with Jeremy at the UN on May 1 or reach out to start a conversation!