Relevance can mean different things to different beneficiaries. For individuals, employability can be enhanced by developing skills and competences that can be transferred from one occupation or sector to others. It is often a combination of micro-credentials that will keep people employable by engaging in regular upskilling and reskilling. Unemployed or laid-off workers can benefit from micro-credentials to reskill to get back to work with skills that are in demand and people who have a job may need to upskill to help improve productivity and performance. For the growing number of freelance workers with short-term contracts without a permanent job, such as online workers, keeping up to date is essential to keep working. In Ireland, e.g. vendor certifications (offered by private companies) have an important role to play in entry to and progress within occupations within the ICT sector (Cedefop, 2022).
Micro-credentials are used to respond to the needs of employers for the specific education and training of their current or future employees, also described as the skills employers are looking for and list in their job postings. German employers stress the importance of micro-credentials being closely linked to practical, flexible, on-demand, and short learning experiences and therefore keeping the regulatory requirements to a minimum. In Slovenia they have formalised these type of micro-credentials as so-called supplementary qualifications within their qualifications framework that supplement professional competences and focus only on the exact needs of employers and are not intended to acknowledge transversal or general skills (Cedefop, 2022).
For society, they are relevant when they contribute to social development and advancing social mobility. Every stakeholder and sector, even person in society stands to benefit from learning which supports social mobility.
Make Micro-Credentials Relevant to Learners
With learners forming the largest demographic of all stakeholders in the learning community, micro-credential designers and issuers should identify which target group of learners they would like to attract, organise consultative outreach activities to understand the needs that should be taken into account in the design and implementation of micro-credential offers and maintain measures to continuously improve the relevance and unique value of micro-credentials for, and with the target group/s. This should be one of the foremost steps in planning the development of micro-credentials. Providers may implement measures such as:
- consulting potential learners, employers, staff within the institution and/or other stakeholders (for e.g. alumni and trade unions) to identify target groups, their needs and the added-value micro-credentials could bring to them;
- evaluating micro-credential programmes with a sample of the target group before launching, after launching, with enrolled learners, as well as after completion of the programme with graduates. This could contribute to improving the relevance of micro-credentials to the target group.
Additionally, relevance implies ensuring that micro-credential design does not exclude part of the target group from accessing, participating in and completing micro-credentials nor from improving them. Micro-credentials which are open access, or otherwise affordable, allow for self-paced small periods of learners which can be personalised to the learners' interest are among the inclusive measures that can be taken to prevent marginalising learners.
Institutions may use a variety of indicators to measure relevance to learners including:
- demographic data to measure whether the intended target groups are being included.
- results from learner evaluation surveys.
- comments and recommendations from external quality assurance reviews.
- data on returning students who choose to take more than one micro-credential with a provider.
Make Micro-Credentials Relevant to the Labour Market
In today's globalised society continuously challenged and transformed by disruptive technologies, global crises and conflicts as well as a labour market characterised by its high mobility, employees and employers are constantly required to develop new skills and competences. The possibility for employers to address specific skills gaps through hiring or training is among the main values of micro-credentials to the labour market (ETF, 2022). Additionally, micro-credentials help assist the transition to labour market for new graduates, address the need for upskilling and reskilling of the workforce, sustain lifelong learning policies and motivate lifelong learning behaviour (Cedefop, 2022).
Educational providers’ ability to make micro-credentials relevant to the labour market depends on their ability to:
- Analyse labour markets to proactively identify emerging skill-gaps.
- Develop timely micro-credentials which are able to address those skill-gaps.
- Attract learners to the micro-credential programmes
- Evolve the offer by incorporating feedback from learners, employers and other stakeholders.
New industry and occupational standards, current practice and in company training, vacancies and other forms of labour market research can be used to identify emerging skill needs, as can be consultations with employers, professional bodies and sectoral organisations, chambers and organisations supporting small and medium enterprise (SME) development. Collaboration between providers and employers can also be sought through, e.g. co-designing and providing micro-credentials as part of continuing professional development (CPD) schemes which may focus on industry-specific skills as well as more general professional competencies.
As the target group of people seeking to upskill or reskill may comprise high proportion of adult learners with extensive work experience compared to more conventional learners, it is necessary for micro-credential providers to take into account measures to ensure this target group is not excluded (see Chapter above and Learner-Centred Micro-Credentials).
Providers should enable employers and professional bodies to take an active role in the development of micro-credentials following recommendations outlined in Quality Assurance of Micro-Credentials including: Engaging professional bodies to endorse the quality of micro-credentials (Implement External Quality Assurance of Micro-Credential Providers), collecting their feedback for the continuous improvement of micro-credentials (Implement Internal Quality Assurance of Micro-Credentials) and publishing quality data such as endorsements from employers (Publish Quality Data). Chapter Publish Skills and Competency Descriptors aligned to Micro-Credentials also recommended how learning outcomes of micro-credentials can be linked with skill and competency descriptors and qualification frameworks to better facilitate transparency for professional recognition, and thus relevance, of micro-credentials. In addition, employers and professional bodies can take a more active role by enabling the interoperability of micro-credentials by integrating verifiable digital credentials into their human resources management systems (see Portability of Micro-Credentials and Recognition of Micro-Credentials for Employment) and developing and using a common language of skills and competencies in digital credentials (see Reinforce a Common Taxonomy of Skills and Competencies in Credentials).
Challenges to the recognition of micro-credentials for employment purposes (and therefore relevance of micro-credentials to the labour market) cannot be solved at the provider-level alone. Chapter Policy-Level Recommendations recommends policy-level actions to scale-up the interoperability of micro-credentials, another critical means to facilitate the relevance of micro-credentials to the labour market. A whole-system approach is also emphasised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) which called upon governments to collaborate more actively with business, non-profit and education and training sectors to not only scale-up micro-credentials but to also link them with national qualification systems to support the recognition of competencies across the learning and earning landscape (World Economic Forum, 2021).
Make Micro-Credentials Relevant to Yourself as a Provider
The question of reputation and cost-benefit ratio plays a significant role in determining the relevance of micro-credentials to E&T organisations and awarding bodies, whether providing them for the first time or in the process of scaling up provision. In either case, the risk of low enrolments always has the potential to dry up the financial streams of the organisation as it also suffers a downgrading in its reputation.
By integrating micro-credentials into existing practices, rather than launching them as a separate strand of work, organisations can complement and where relevant widen the organisation's missions and strategies. In this way, micro-credentialing can be seen less as a burden and more as an opportunity to expand the use of and gains from the organisation's budget. While E&T organisations with access to bigger budgets could take more risk of being more innovative with designing and issuing new micro-credentials than those with access to lower budgets - many E&T organisations have already some experiences organising micro-credentialing on smaller scales through e.g. the provision of unique non-formal learning awards and certificates.
Micro-credentials may be designed to reach learners which would otherwise be excluded from education and training, to address pressing economic and/or social needs in a timely fashion or (via recognition) to extend the scope of a learning offer beyond what an institution can usually provide. Each of these use cases presents the possibility for institutions to better meet social goals.
Making micro-credentials relevant to a wider pool of learners in a way that it contributes to improving the providers' reputations, their ability to fulfil their missions as well as the cost-efficiency of their operations is a complex process requiring providers to ensure that the necessary capacity and competencies of staff (including teachers and administrators) is both available and able to be continuously developed throughout the micro-credential design and implementation process. Investment in the training of staff, both in terms of funds and measures to encourage participation of staff is crucial to ensure the relevance of micro-credentials to providers.
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Staff [should] undertake regular training and develop cooperation with relevant external stakeholders to support capacity building and quality improvement, and to enhance performance. |
Pursue realistic opportunities for Micro-Credentialing
Ensuring micro-credentials are both relevant to learners and an added value to all stakeholders requires a whole-system approach in designing, implementing and improving micro-credentials. Anything less may risk internal disputes. For instance, micro-credentials could risk not being recognised at the programme level despite the leadership of the same E&T organisation setting targets for micro-credential provision.
When many of those within an E&T organisation are novices to micro-credentialing, taking a moment to identify opportunities to simply integrate micro-credentials into already existing strategies and operations can go a long way in overcoming concerns. The project Micro-Credentials Exchange (MicroCredX) developed an Opportunity Scoping Tool, depicted in Figure 7, to support the development of institutional micro-credential strategies.
Figure 7: The MicroCredX Opportunity Scoping Tool for developing Institutional Micro-Credential Strategies.
The tool consists of organisational questions to help in defining clear and tangible opportunities and indicators for the successful implementation of micro-credentials. The questions are best answered in dialogue with all stakeholders in an institution – through the organisation of workshops with staff at all levels thus enabling the co-development and co-ownership of an institutional strategy for micro-credentials.
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