Digital micro-credentials serve the workforce and adult learners

Janelle Elias, Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs, Rio Salado College

Janelle Elias, Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs, Rio Salado College

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a displacement of the workforce and digital transformation underway in public higher education. Vanguard estimates that an additional 1.6M workers retired during the pandemic, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there were approximately 10.5M unfilled jobs in the United States in 2022. According to Strada Education Network, burning Glass calculates that about 41 percent of unfilled jobs require college degrees, yet 60 percent of the working adult population does not have college degrees. This level of market disruption, coupled with digital transformation, is widening skills gaps in many organizations.

Employers urgently trying to fill vacant positions and ensure the staffing levels needed to run the business are responding in two major ways: 1.) dropping college degree requirements from job postings, and 2.) providing tuition assistance as a benefit to attract and retain a competitive workforce. Employers are increasingly focusing these efforts on the minimal skills needed to do the job and then investing in upskilling and reskilling their employees through micro-credentials.

Adult learners are characterized as being self-directed, yet they need career-relevant and applicable education. They are less likely to engage in a curriculum that shows no clear path to their career goals. For this reason, it is important to contextualize the learning in the workplace and/or career. When done well, a student can complete work- or project-based learning and apply it to job and degree requirements.

Adult learners also require flexibility in accessing opportunities to upskill and reskill. They balance the demands of work, family, and school priorities, and many attend school part-time. The flexibility offered by non-traditional education - such as online, asynchronous, accelerated, and non-credit - fits well into a working adult lifestyle.

A micro-credential represents a recognition that a learner has demonstrated mastery in a competency or skill in a particular area. This provides a mechanism to bridge the skills gap between employers and adult learners. Micro-credentials are offered in a variety of modalities, including online, asynchronous, accelerated boot camps, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). A good micro-credential offers a short-form, skills-based, career-relevant learning opportunity. Some micro-credentials focus on foundational and transferable skills, such as critical thinking and oral communication. The best micro-credentials lead to clear employment outcomes and align with ongoing educational pathways; they serve as both on-ramps to degrees and off-ramps to jobs, blurring the lines between working and learning for the employed adult.

‘Colleges and universities are experimenting with a spectrum of teaching and learning modalities and smaller units of skills and competencies, rather than the traditional credit-bearing courses and accredited degrees.’

Micro-credentials are not a new concept to training and professional development fields focused on adult learners. However, the recent proliferation of micro-credential offerings in higher education institutions signals how colleges and universities adapt to the workforce's needs and the demands of a shifting student demographic. Colleges are experimenting with micro-credentials not only for continuing education but more urgently as on-ramps into entry-level employment and academic pathways to degrees. Designing an effective micro-credential involves alignment and stackability into degree programs. This may require a resequencing of the curriculum and necessitates ongoing validation from employers. Micro-credentials require agile development and evaluation lifecycles. The time it takes to bring a micro-credential to market becomes critical for employers who need to build talent pipelines.

Whatever a micro-credentials teaching and learning modality, it should be recognized with a digital badge, a certificate, or an industry certification. The digital badge is a common representation of a completed micro-credential and signals that the learner has relevant, employable, in-demand skills (even if they do not have a college degree). Badges provide learners with portable units of education that are valuable when aligned within the context of career and educational pathways. However, the current state of more than 1M credentials in the post-secondary and secondary marketplace reflects a lack of standardization and consensus on which skills are most valuable and how to demonstrate mastery. Each institution is left to determine its skills and badging framework. Some good models are to follow, including the open skills network and education design lab's 21st Century Skills badges. Standards are emerging in the issuing, validating, and sharing of digital micro-credentials from 1EdTech, W3C, and forthcoming HR open standards.

Exciting partnerships between employers and higher education continue to evolve, offering career-relevant micro-credentials and free college as a benefit of employment. Colleges and universities are experimenting with a spectrum of teaching and learning modalities and smaller units of skills and competencies rather than traditional credit-bearing courses and accredited degrees. Faculty increasingly recognize the validity of alternative forms of education and prior learning assessment and are experimenting with unbundling and repackaging curricula that are stackable into educational pathways. Approaches to assessing student learning are broadening as faculty must validate mastery of skills and competencies through performance-based assessment. This road leads to the broader adoption of competency-based and self-paced education and requires more comprehensive learning portability in systems than a college transcript. Blockchain technology is used to aggregate digital wallets and comprehensive learner records that can serve as a holistic picture of skills and credentials for working adults.

Today, the higher education demographic is shifting: the non-traditional working adult is becoming the majority of college-going students. Micro-credentials offered in various formats and modalities best meet the needs of self-directed adult learners who require flexibility. Using quality assessment of skills and competencies allows employers to hire and promote these adults to fill workforce gaps. A true intersection between higher education and industry is emerging to redefine job postings, skills assessments, and work-based learning experiences and validate alternative education. Digital badging of skills and competencies is becoming a currency for students and employers and represents an unbundling of traditional academic degrees.

Nonetheless, the broader goal of educators is not just to help the student obtain the first or next job but also to provide a realistic opportunity for ongoing engagement in lifelong learning. In this evolving credential landscape, getting lost in the absence of standards and inconsistencies of language and approaches may be easy. One universal truth of instructional design persists: the role of the educator is to assess the skills gaps and then design and develop relevant learning experiences tailored to the audience. Digital micro-credentials are an approach that serves the needs of the workforce and adult learners.