Education is still the most powerful lever for shaping the future, even as the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changes how students learn.
Since March, there have been four times as many industry certifications issued by the digital credentialing platform Credly, where one of us works, than the nearly 2 million bachelor’s degrees issued by all U.S. colleges and universities in 2019. Hiring on the basis of validated abilities, rather than degrees, is creating a talent marketplace with skills as its currency, providing access to a broader range of qualified applicants, and creating a more diverse workforce where people are granted opportunities on the basis of what they can do, rather than which institutions or networks they were able to enter.
Given that many adults will have multiple careers, people’s occupational identity is becoming more an evolving suite of skills rather than a specific role. However, typical classrooms at every level are dominated by one-size-fits-all instruction. Courses are filled with data easy to memorize and measure, but useless in a world of search engines. To acquire first jobs, reskill, and upskill, learners are increasingly attaining alternative credentials recognizing achievements such as industry certifications, nanodegrees, and completion of third-party training.
These credentials are increasingly complementing, or in some cases replacing, warrants from higher education, undercutting phrases like “bachelor’s degree required” in hiring descriptions as employers seek to build a right-skilled workforce. The top workplace basic skills sought by employers are communication, teamwork, sales and customer service, leadership, problem solving, and complex thinking. According to a 2019 report by SHRM, 83% of human-resources professionals say they had difficulty recruiting suitable job candidates, and 75% of those who reported difficulty said there are skills gaps in job candidates.
Employers want job seekers to have validated skills and competencies, contextualized by rich and transparent data, rather than degrees/certifications backed by transcripts containing vague course titles. Educational institutions need to adapt new models of instruction and recognition not only to remain competitive, but to stay useful to generations of lifelong learners.
For students committed to a higher-education degree, schools can better equip them to participate successfully in a skills-driven marketplace by issuing microcredentials across the student’s entire learning experience. Microcredentials for courses, certificates, and co-curricular achievements can be issued to make up a comprehensive learner record, which can feed into a portable, student-owned record of achievements that students will carry with them throughout their lifelong learning and employment experience. Such a record transparently represents the activities completed, the context in which they were finished, and proven outcomes—all with a dynamic connection to where those specific skills are in demand today. Rather than an all-or-nothing approach in which a learner either earns a diploma or leaves with empty hands, microcredentials allow learners to earn skills as they learn.
This is already happening at some forward-thinking colleges/universities, particularly within community college systems that are under high pressure to align with the needs of the workforce. Santa Barbara City College, for example, issues digital credentials for over 40 courses offered by their Career Skills Institute. With better skills data validated by education providers, employers have the opportunity to make hiring decisions based on information about what people can actually do.
The returns on investing in a shift to skills-based hiring are vast. Educational providers that prove to be of highest value to learners rise to the top, increasing visibility of and demand for their programs. Students with a growth and learning mind-set are rewarded for their development and have more confidence and ownership in their careers. And employers who reimagine their role in finding and supporting talent see a positive impact on their bottom line, as investing in people leads to higher retention, higher engagement, and more effective employment of their work force’s potential. Further, the entire ecosystem benefits from the enhanced diversity of candidate pools, which improves corporate financial performance.
For inspiration, colleges and universities can look to increasingly successful alternative credentialing programs, such as Google’s Career Certificates or General Assembly’s immersive boot camps, or to innovative higher education institutions like Western Governors University or Southern New Hampshire University that have reoriented to better serve today’s students.
Another important shift for higher education is to certify attainment of skills developed based on modern knowledge about the mind and brain. Students will increasingly put their knowledge into practice through active forms of teaching/learning. These are characterized by collaborative, guided, learning by doing to complement passive learning by assimilation. They provide students agency to include their personal interests and infuse these into the curriculum to be covered. These programs also complement high-stakes tests with diagnostic/formative assessments that measure a broad range of knowledge and skills useful in life, and involve many types of people as “teachers” in various student life settings, extending learning outside the classroom.
These alternative programs are often cheaper and more flexible, and have innovative tuition models that allow students to avoid debt altogether, such as income-share agreements or earn-and-learn arrangements. This eliminates a significant price barrier to entry and creates an on-ramp for working students and those without the means to take on significant student loans to enter, or re-enter, the workforce.
Overall, educators must face the historically unprecedented “new abnormal.” The future will be quite different than the immediate past. We face a worldwide interdependent civilization shaped by economic turbulence from artificial intelligence and globalization to climate change, poverty, and advanced social and immersive media.
Teachers will have to unlearn habits and assumptions about teaching. Leaders used to command-and-control, top-down authority structures will need to move toward distributed power and responsibility. Shifting an educational vision beyond the mirage that high grades and elite educational institutions lead to guaranteed success in life will be essential to cope with the next turbulent, disruptive, half-century of change. Complementing traditional diplomas of academic success with alternative credentials validated as skills is a better, more equitable way forward.
Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in learning technologies at Harvard University and the co-author of Preparing Students for a Lifelong Disruptive Future: The 60-Year Curriculum.
Katie Sievers is a customer success manager at Credly and education researcher studying alternative postsecondary pathways.
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