The Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange (MLDE) facilitates data sharing between states from K-12 education, higher education, and labor agencies. Its goal is to provide practitioners, policymakers, and researchers with a comprehensive data source to understand educational and career trajectories, including how these trajectories can cross state lines, to improve policies and programs serving students and provide better consumer information. The exchange, begun as a pilot in 2010, is a collaboration between the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and state agencies that house education and work data in multiple states and has been largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past five years, the MLDE's third-party evaluator, the Education & Employment Research Center (EERC) at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, has engaged in a mixed-methods research evaluation of the MLDE implementation process. This brief draws on EERC's qualitative research, which included 40 interviews with state leaders and WICHE staff, observations of user group meetings, surveys, and MLDE document analysis. This EERC brief is one of a five-brief series that explores the development of the MLDE and details the lessons learned about building and using longitudinal multistate data systems for policy and practice. It first discusses the reasons why states have joined the MLDE or considered joining the MLDE. It then talks about states' interest in data and the ways data can be used to evaluate non-degree credentials (NDCs) including ideas heard from state policymakers during the study as well as ideas found in current literature and media on the topic. The brief concludes with the recommendation that as states and territories continue to develop and build their own longitudinal data systems, they should consider the value of both adding data on NDCs and sharing that data with other states.