What Skills Should I Recognize with Micro-credentials?
Greetings friends,
Thanks again for checking out our micro-credential multiverse resources.
Check out the companion slide deck I created for this edition of the newsletter
As you know by now, I'm always looking for new ways to make micro-credentials more accessible. In serve to this personal and professional goal, I regularly create companion slide decks for my in-depth walkthroughs. My hope is that this will make it easier to facilitate conversations between my subscribers/followers/clients and their respective stakeholders.
🌈 Let me know if you like the slides and feel free to share them with your community!
What skills should I recognize with micro-credentials?
When organizations are kicking off their micro-credentialing journey, they will likely end up asking themselves some version of this question,
"What skills and competencies should I consider recognizing with micro-credentials?"
This is a great first question to ask and will likely yield a variety of good answers. I want to use this edition of the newsletter to elaborate on some examples to help your team frame that question for yourselves. I'll also fundamentally expand on skills so you can track my rationale.
I consider this a "narrowing it down" exercise.
Step 1: Getting Started Checklist
Here's a shortlist of things you'll want to consider before going through this exercise:
Personalized learner personas: Who will be earning these micro-credentials? These personas should be specific and are generally based on the folks your organization currently serves.
Meaningful recognizer outcomes analysis: Whom will learners share these micro-credentials with, and what outcomes will they unlock? Examples of recognizers can be a list of associations, employers, and other folks your organization already worked with or partnered. Endorsements from these people will make your micro-credentials much more valuable with a thing I like to call "Career Currency." We'll talk more about that in a future newsletter.
Concrete issuer value propositions: What value does your organization (as an issuer of the micro-credential) offer learners? For example, will your branded credentials turn heads, or do you need to get another brand on the certificate to give it that wow factor? You can also think about this through the lens of the instructional content. Is your content based on industry-aligned standards, or have you aligned the content to career-ready skills offered by a particular industry-standard product?
An example of concrete issuer value propositions
I like a company called FourthRev a lot. I like them for many reasons, but I especially appreciate that their "digital skills courses" have all been aligned with tools developed for and used by industry leaders in their respective categories. This alignment adds massive value to the learner because they're learning career-relevant skills, and it's a win for employers who can be sure that if a learner has earned that award, they're ready to roll up their sleeves and get started on day 1.
In other words,
When a learner earns a credential from the FourthRev in "business analytics," they've demonstrated core competencies using Tableau.
When a learner earns a credential from FourthRev in "UX Design Fundamentals," they've demonstrated core competencies using Canva's beautiful suite of industry-leading products.
There are many ways your organization (as a potential issuer) can start to brainstorm and inventory your unique strengths in the space that you're looking to micro-credential.
Those strengths will send valuable signals to recognizers and learners.
Step 2: Start with broad strokes - let's talk about skill "categories"
Consider these three facts:
There are very few individual skills and competencies that are valuable in a vacuum.
Isolated skills do little to support learners' career aspirations and have very little market value to employers.
Every individual skill has an intrinsic "half-life." A skill's "half-life" is a function of its waning industry relevance against the persistent march of innovation and the likelihood that the skill will be automated by a machine, among other factors. Sometimes I think about this as a skill's "expiration date."
This is all to say that skills can and should be grouped into categories; let's look at an example.
Emsi Skill Categories
I know I mention Emsi a lot, but I am a fan. For the uninitiated, Emsi has taken a machine learning approach that scans hundreds of millions of individual sources in pursuit of skill data. These sources include job posts, resumes, online profiles, labor market data, etc. They've distilled more than 32,000 individual career-relevant skills from that enormous set of data. Then they took all of these unique skills and used regional labor market data to create regionally-specific skills clusters.
The whole idea of this first step is to come up with categories that your team can agree on.
Think of skills clusters like a high-resolution version of SOC-O*NET. This is where I'm starting to guess, but the 30+ skill categories that Emsi has proposed are likely a function of those skills clusters plus the overall skills data library.
I encourage you to look at Emsi's relatively new skill category page. This example is a great way to determine your approach to establishing skills categories. Or, you could piggyback off of their work, reference their skills in your micro-credentials, and go that route. The whole idea of this first step is to come up with a category system that your team can agree on and will ultimately matter to your learners.
Step 3: let's categorize the categories.
For consistency, I'll continue elaborating on the example set by Emsi.
Their team has divided the 32,000 skills I mentioned into three categories.
Soft Skills (for example, Active Listening and Collaboration)
Technical Skills (for example, coding in Java or Gas Tungsten Arc Welding)
Licenses (like CompTIA Security+ or CCNA Security)
I like this distinction because most career outcomes require skills from one or more skill categories. For example, when I was a professional educator, I needed lots of soft skills to be an effective biology teacher, but I also needed a handful of technical skills along with my standard certificate from New Jersey State.
This step aims to help you imagine the kinds of skills that will populate your categories. Additionally, most micro-credentials should contain some technical skills, but soft skills give them contextual value in a workplace setting - working with other human people. It seems obvious in hindsight, but this is a significant weakness in most credentialing systems I see.
Step 4: Narrow down the skills
Here are ten soft skills you should consider embedding into your micro-credentials individually or along your micro-credential pathways. Feel free to grab some of these or list the skills you would like to credential.
Communication
Leadership
Problem-solving
Time management
Organizational skills
Research skills
Critical thinking
Interpersonal skills
Teamwork
Creativity
Step 5: Expand on skills with a WHY statement
After you've got your list (or borrowed from the one above), you're going to want to get together with your team to start writing "why" statements.
In Simon Sinek's famous TED talk, he insisted that folks start with why and I tend to agree. For me, "why statements" are descriptions everyone can agree on. They're tweet-length and aren't intended to teach anyone anything they don't already know.
Communication: The ability to communicate effectively is essential in any profession. Micro-credentials can help identify individuals who have strong communication skills.
Leadership: Leaders are essential in any organization. Micro-credentials can help identify individuals who can lead and inspire others.
Problem-solving: The ability to solve problems is essential in any profession. Micro-credentials can help identify individuals who can think critically and find creative solutions.
Teamwork: Working effectively as part of a team is essential in any profession. Micro-credentials can help identify individuals who can collaborate and work towards common goals.
Time management: Managing one's time effectively is essential in any profession. Micro-credentials can help identify individuals who can prioritize and manage their time efficiently.
If you've gone through each of these steps, you'll be well on your way to creating a meaningful and actionable list of "micro-credential able" skills.
Summary
To summarize, this edition of the newsletter will help you determine:
Getting Started Checklist
Skills Categories (stacks of skills)
Categories of Categories (types of skills)
Skill list (what you might want to credential)
Basic "Why" statements for each of your skills.
This might seem like a basic exercise, but it's a great way to get your team on the same page. Buy-in is by far the most challenging step you're going to take in your micro-credential journey, and it's always best to start a journey on the right foot!
🌈 Thank you for reading my article 🌎
I hope these strategies will help you create rewarding experiences for your learners as the world does its best to get back to work.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider:
🕊 Following my new company Micro-credential Multiverse.
💌 Subscribing to my newsletter on LinkedIn to get these posts delivered conveniently to your inbox.
🌎 Sharing this article with someone in your network.
