The Future of Workforce Development
While micro-credentialing cannot be the entirety of future workforce development, it is almost certainly a significant part of it.
If this seems unlikely, it's probably because of its controversial nature.
To dispel this, we say, look at online learning and webinars. Both of these were once frowned upon.
Today, both are major pillars of online information sharing and learning.
These and other examples make it clear that adopting micro-credentialing will put your organization ahead of the competition, and failure to do so will likely have the opposite effect.
What Is Micro-Credentialing?
Micro-Credentialing is a way to imbue your workforce with provable, demonstrable skills and know-how that can give your business-critical capabilities rapidly.
They are small units of learning that are ideal for turning the nearly-perfect candidate into a true key player.
They are cost-effective and have proven their value across a wide range of business models and industries.
The Benefits of Micro-Credentialing
Besides being affordable and effective, there are many reasons micro-credentialing is a smart move.
- Benchmarking Capabilities: Gain clear indicators of skills learned and capabilities established
- Objectively Assess Soft Skills: Get provable data surrounding the human-based skills your team has and learns
- Support Your Team During Disruptive Events: Give your employees opportunities to develop tools that will help keep them viable as tech and economies change
- Boost Employee Engagement: Gain the valuable asset of a workforce that is actively working to better itself
- Make Learning More Convenient: Provide simple ways your team can improve in their own time, at their convenience
- Offer Opportunities for Higher Learning: Micro-credentialing can lead your employees to be positioned for even greater self-improvement, opening doors for them as well as the company
The Importance of a Micro-Credential Strategy
Of course, deploying these educational solutions requires a plan.
You need to know what capabilities your company needs and which micro-credentialing units are best for obtaining them.
Aligning with Organizational Goals
To begin, you want to choose micro-credentialing building blocks that are in line with the goals and needs of your business.
This does not just mean taking on units for given skills without a plan.
It means planning out a course of learning that builds on itself and that is flexible in light of possible business environment changes over the next five to ten years.
Ensuring Effective Skill Development
To ensure that the skills you choose to develop and the units you invest in are functional, you will need to engage in research, leverage professional guidance, and do rigorous testing.
Addressing and Preempting Skill Gaps
Finally, skill gaps both before and after the completion of micro-credential units must be detected and addressed effectively.
Components of a Micro-Credential Strategy
Naturally, your plan itself must be properly formed.
What follows is a formula for the creation of a micro-credentialing strategy that has worked for many organizations reporting on this topic.
We recommend this formula, as do most of the most trusted advisors on the topic. That does not mean that your optimal strategy will follow these guidelines, but we recommend incorporating them nonetheless.
The good news is that this tried and tested formula is pretty simple.
- Needs Assessment: The first thing you need is sites on the objectives your organization has or should have.
A fulsome needs assessment is the only way you can determine what capabilities, skills, and know-how your team needs to develop to get you there.
For example, if you're a publishing company that wants to go into ebook sales, you will need people with the ability to perform and create within digital spaces.
You will need coders, designers, and the like.
You will need to hire from without, but you can also use micro-credentialing to upskill your existing team. - Skills Inventory: Before you start investing in the skills you need, take a look at the skills you have.
A good place to start is to begin listing known skills based on job performance and job descriptions.
Then try searching your workforce for hidden skills. There's always a chance that someone does something you need as a hobby.
Oftentimes, such talent is highly skilled and valuable.
After this is done, you'll know what skills to develop using micro-credentialing and avoid the risk of spending money unnecessarily. - Design Suite of Micro-Credentials: Because every business and every organization is unique, yours is certain to have unique needs.
This means that ready-made courses that teach the exact skills you need are going to be rare.
A much better bet is to develop the courses you need with your own Micro-Credential Design Suite.
A tool like this can give you direction and the insight you need to not only know what special skills you require but also the ability to tailor them to your precise needs. - Micro-Credential Framework: A micro-credentialing framework is a tool to help define guidance on defining new and proposed micro-credential courses built for specific needs.
It can provide leaders with guidance as they work toward assessing their readiness to engage with the micro-credentialing space and to begin building the optimal coursework for their needs.
Aligning Micro-Credentials With Business Goals
No matter what stage of development your business is in, the tools in the plan described above will give you the ability to craft valuable skill-building courses.
Whether you are a new startup, a journeyman organization, an inter-generational team looking to bridge new gaps, or a veteran team of professionals pursuing a proven path, there is a micro-credentialing strategy that can work for you.
Identifying Key Business Goals
Key business goals are not the same as your unique business objectives.
They are about maintaining and growing a business.
Building skills like this is important for startups, creative types looking to make an entrepreneurial move, and more.
They can also be important for experienced teams looking to branch out in a new direction since new creative ideas can make it easy to lose track of your foundation.
Mapping Skills to Objectives
It's one thing to say that we need, say, a marketing strategist.
It is quite another to realize that you need to reach a specific demographic at a minimum threshold and devise a credentialing plan that can provide the skills to achieve that goal.
One is like looking at the top of the mountain.
The other is like investing in an off-road vehicle that can take you there.
This is what we mean by mapping objectives to skills.
Setting Key Performance Indicators
Discovering meaningful indicators of performance is a critical part of how you select, adjust, and improve the micro-credentialing courses you buy and build.
As you gain experience with them, it will also be part of how you learn to invest in the latest and greatest learning materials.
Stakeholder Engagement in Your Strategy
Your shareholders and stakeholders deserve to know what you're investing in when you go into something as new and controversial as micro-credentialing.
- Involving Management and Executives: Bringing all authoritative personnel on board with your plan and objectives is a key part of how you achieve them.
- Communicating with Employees: Ensuring your team knows what will be expected of them and what they can expect to gain is an important part of how your upskilling objectives will gain traction.
- Consulting External Experts: Those whose fortunes and careers depend on your decisions deserve to know that you are consulting top experts in the field.
You do have a responsibility to do this, at least in the early stages.
To this end, our team is here to back you up fully in the beginning, through integration, and even as ongoing support.
Funding and Budget Considerations
As with any new investment type, you must be able to show the value you expect to gain.
In the initial stages, you probably want to remain well under budget just to keep everyone in their comfort zone.
As the value of micro-credentialing proves itself, be sure to consistently have the following in place.
- Costs Associated with Platform Selection
- Budget for Content Creation
- Ongoing Costs and ROI Analysis
Best Practices in Strategy Implementation
As you move forward with implementing your upskilling plans, three things will help ensure a smooth start.
- Phased Rollout Plans: leave plenty of room between steps to evaluate your progress and remain agile
- Feedback Loops for Continuous Improvement: Keep your KPIs and monitoring robust
- Monitoring and Updating the Strategy: As you monitor your progress, do not just be ready to update your strategy, but demonstrate your ability to do so at the earliest possible stage
Micro-Credentialing Strategy Review & Updates
Hindsight is 20/20, and for long-term performance in micro-credentialing, a robust review policy is indispensable.
- Regularly Reviewing Outcomes: Every measurable outcome should be documented and compared to other measurable outcomes and expectations
- Adjusting Strategy in Line with Industry Changes: As your environment changes and as KPIs fall short, your strategy must change.
Your consultant team can guide you through this - Methods for Keeping the Strategy Up-to-Date: Staying abreast of news related to micro-credentialing is another important part of any good plan
Conclusion
Remember the primary recommended components of a good micro-credentialing strategy:
- Needs Assessment
- Skills Inventory
- Design Suite of Micro-Credentials
- Micro-Credential Framework
Without a good micro-credentialing strategy, you're shooting in the dark.
Our goal is to ensure that you don't have to guess what it takes to succeed in this cutting-edge upskilling modality.
Now it's time to give careful consideration to the next steps and decide whether micro-credentialing is right for you.
Get in touch today to learn more.
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