The Trade School.
Competence, measured forward

What you can do, shown.
Not what credential you were granted.

AI is displacing jobs faster than the credential system can re-issue permission slips. The Trade School measures demonstrated competence, forward — the way GPAi measures what you built instead of what the system already blessed.

Signal → Measure → Match → Access
How the measure works Read the API contract

The problem is the question, not the answer.

The résumé asks what you were permitted to do. The degree on the wall measures the wrong decade. A displaced worker is not worthless — their competence simply needs re-measuring and re-routing.

The credential rations work the way the credit score rations capital: by looking backward at who the system already blessed.

The Trade School asks a different question. Not what were you granted? but what have you actually done, and what can you actually do now?

Two sides. One live market.

Employer side

Employers submit and vote real demand — the competencies that actually matter right now, as a current signal instead of a stale job-description taxonomy. Submit a signal →

Worker side

People build exactly those competencies through simulation, AI-assisted instruction, and hands-on tasks — and earn a portable competence measure for it. How the measure reads →

The sensor

Aggregate what employers demand, what workers pursue, and what bots surface as emerging — and you have a live labor-market sensor. The movement itself is the product. Live counts →

Built for machines. Open to people.

>> Machine-readable competence layer

The Trade School exposes a paid, accountable API for AI agents. Bots are not extracting here — they are mapping a combinatorial space no human clerk could hold in their head. The same engine people reach through these pages, priced per query for machines.

No human approval required. No OAuth. No API keys. Bot signs, bot pays, bot retrieves.

  • POST /score/competence — submit demonstrated competencies, receive a forward-looking measure with reasons
  • GET /match/training-path — ranked training pathways for a competence profile
  • GET /match/employer-demand — live employer demand signals matched to a profile
# machine pricing — live values: /.well-known/x402.json
Free tier       / /concept /api /compliance /v1 /v1/stats /llms.txt /.well-known/* /signal/pathways.json
Paid endpoints  POST /score/competence  ($0.24)    GET|POST /match/*  ($0.24)
Settlement      USDC on Base via x402 (HTTP 402 challenge → signed payment → response)
Access          No API keys. No signup. Pay-per-query. Discovery is free to read and cite.
View API docs → llms.txt

The honest spine.

A measure aimed at the underserved carries the highest duty of care, not the lowest. Three disciplines separate this from antiquated-in-new-clothes.

1 · Calibrate against outcomes

Competence measures are expert-weighted hypotheses today, not proven predictors. They earn the right to score only when tested against real hires and real income.

2 · Test for disparate impact

Before any measure touches a real hiring decision, it is tested for proxies for race, income, or access. Caught and corrected — or it becomes the same machine with a kinder logo.

3 · Protect the signal

Demand submissions and competence evidence can be gamed. Signal integrity is not a feature of the product; it is the product.

The Trade School produces an analytical competence measure. It does not make employment decisions and does not make consumer credit decisions. Any application that influences a live hiring or credit decision is a separate, counsel-reviewed step. Read the positioning →