Canada pilots blockchain staff records

The Government of Canada (GC) is using blockchain technology to issue project-based employees with a kind of digital CV, providing “a permanent, self-owned and secure record of their skills and experiences.”
Alex Benay, the country’s chief information officer, announced the project last week in a blog post, writing: “Proving yourself with paper or checking a database will now be a thing of the past.”
Project staff will be issued with digital credentials called Blockcerts. These will be recognised and accepted by the government’s experimental jobs platform, Talent Cloud.
A use case for blockchain
In his post, Benay writes: “At the Digital 9 Summit back in November 2018, I shared our intentions to explore a Blockchain credential pilot with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since then, the MIT Media Lab, together with [technology firm] Learning Machine, have developed an international open standard for issuing digital credentials known as Blockcerts.
“Today, we’re taking this one step further and working directly with Learning Machine to produce Blockchain credentials for the GC’s Free Agents.”
Since 2016, the government has been experimenting with a new workforce model which aims to provide a flexible and adaptable workforce fit for 21st century public services. Floating government staff, known as ‘Free Agents’, have been retained to work on short-term projects across a range of public sector agencies.
Logging learning
In the collaborative one-year pilot project run by the GC Talent Cloud team, the Digital Identity Unit at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) and Learning Machine, these staff will now be issued with the blockchain credentials.
According to Learning Machine, Blockcerts enable the employee to become “their own ‘lifelong registrar’, able to store, access, and verify any Blockcert issued to them by any provider anywhere in the world.”
The company’s website states that any person or institution will be able to use the technology without any additional costs or special software. “This is the breakthrough of decentralised credentials enabled by secure, recipient-owned digital records using the global open standard,” it says.
Benay says that he’s “excited about this work and the potential that Blockchain certification will provide Canada and other leading digital nations around the world.”
Not to be knocking of new technology but I would think that experience would need to be brought up to date as jargon changes. When I started working sick was a term used for illness and dope was something that was a pitfall you wanted to avoid as a simple example. Setting subjective descriptions of experience in stone doesn’t seem like a good plan. Is this just a blockchain vanity project?