Welcome to Merit’s Blog.

Digital licensing and verification for medical professionals cuts administrative barriers so medical personnel can respond to the crisis across state lines

The United States Congress passed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) in 2014 with wide bipartisan support, to help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support in order to succeed in the labor market. WOIA is responsible for reforming and injecting funding into many key programs that are critical to getting citizens ready for work.

Merit is complementary to these efforts, as our platform helps states unlock their workforce’s potential by providing a single, secure platform to issue, track, and verify credentials earned and trainings completed. As our team meets with labor and workforce partners and key stakeholders across the country, it is increasingly clear that Merit addresses many components of the WOIA.

Here are three specific ways in which Merit is complementary to the WIOA.

The program is the first-of-its-kind to issue merits, allowing greater communication, real-time information sharing between state agencies and qualified volunteers, and more efficient crisis response.

A question we often get asked by potential partners, investors, the media, and candidates looking to join Merit is some variation of, “How does Merit make money?” Our vision is to build a network of truth and trust so everyone can shape their future, and that’s only achievable if everyone in the ecosystem gets value from Merit. Bill Gates once said, “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it,” and we strongly agree with this platform mentality. Merit is in the business of value creation, not value extraction. Therefore we are very deliberate when it comes to our monetization strategy.

It's rare to meet a developer that enjoys writing and maintaining test code. Often testing is seen as an additional (tedious) step to completing a story, a hindrance to the team's velocity, or yet another time sink required by their company's "Definition of Done." In my experience, this is the case when teams try to chase a specific code coverage percentage. At Merit we don't chase code coverage and we want developers to enjoy writing tests, or at least to feel the tests they write are effective.

New initiative seeks to help veterans navigate the job search and connect to opportunities commensurate with their skills and experience

For the past few years, the construction industry has been identified as a "laggard" when it comes to digital transformation. The old-school ways prevailed for many years while technology was applied to nearly every other industry. Even agriculture and farming adopted technology faster than construction. Recently, a lot of that has changed as investors began eyeballing technology that is revolutionizing construction.

This morning we learned that Merit was named one of the Best Workplaces in the Bay Area by Great Place to Work and Fortune Magazine! We are humbled by this distinction, and are proud to be in the company of the other great organizations on this list.

Our vision at Merit is for every person to get a fulfilling way to capture and gain greater access to their life’s merits in order to have the confidence, foresight, and autonomy to qualify for relevant opportunities and shape their future.

A critical part of that vision is “gaining great access,” meaning individuals should be able to make the most of their hard-earned achievements by gaining insight into all the opportunities their merits unlock.

That requires being able to share merits, and today we’re excited to launch merit link sharing for simple verification.

Organizations of all types use Merit to send digital credentials, or merits. These can be anything from licenses to certificates, or even records of attendance, and are often manually sent to people individually, or using bulk upload by filling out a copy of the downloadable template.

Interviewing engineers is really hard. It’s hard for the interviewer, but more importantly, it’s very hard for the candidate.

Last month, Merit announced its partnership with Virginia’s Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation (DPOR) to streamline licensing and digital credentialing for thousands of professionals in the Commonwealth. More than 310,000 Virginia workers in more than 40 industries are required by law to have a license from DPOR to work. Merit’s platform will give these professionals an easier way to bring their licenses with them wherever they go and make the certification more accessible to consumers and businesses.