Micro-credentialing is the way of the future when it comes to improving the prospects of your workforce, your business, and the people you serve.
Micro-credentialing makes it possible to build new bridges to undiscovered value, making sure everyone has an opportunity to benefit.
However, these seemingly simple learning modalities must be carefully crafted to move your organization across otherwise insurmountable gaps.
The good news is that in the relatively short time, these skill development tools have been available, the business world has made incredible progress in standardizing and perfecting how micro-credentials can be selected, built, and optimized.
Here, we'll discuss the four critical roles to fill as you develop your micro-credentialing tool set.
This short list of roles may not be either too little or too great for the needs of your organization and your industry.
But in most cases, they will provide an optimal framework for the task.
In any event, this tried and proven recommendation is sure to help you achieve liftoff as you adopt micro-credentialing, giving you more than enough experience to tailor your strategy perfectly.
There is no object known to science more complex than the human brain.
Therefore we must approach teaching and learning with respect.
The relationship between the roles in micro-credentialing design and administration is intended to allow for this complexity to exist and for learners to flourish.
In a family, everyone has both traditional roles and the flexibility to play with the boundaries of those roles as they see fit.
The same is true in micro-credentialing design and administration.
The roles we will describe and the flux between them can shift and adapt depending on the needs of the organization and the learners.
The concept behind and purpose of these roles are dependent on persistent collaboration.
When we use the word collaboration in this context, of course, we're talking about more than simple conversation.
We're talking about active co-creation in an evolving process.
This requires flexibility.
In pursuing this active co-creation process, leveraging the expertise of our four primary roles, our most persistent aim is to ensure quality in our micro-credentialing programs and the relevance of the skills and knowledge we aim to teach.
Without quality, our programs will lack value.
Without relevance, you will fail in your aims and lose support for your programs within your industry.
The four recommended roles of an industry-standard micro-credentialing development team are designed to cover all of the needs, routines, uncertainties, and pitfalls of creating novel courses of learning designed to reach new sources of value.
Each of the four roles has its area of expertise and authority.
They also have their points of weakness.
But these points of weakness should be looked at as recesses in a cog, allowing the other cogs to mesh with them effectively.
In the best-crafted scenarios, these strengths and weaknesses should be established or retained by design and curated for optimal effect.
How these respective strengths and weaknesses will interact in the real world will depend on several factors.
These include the unique needs of your organization, the expectations of your customers/clients, your industry, regulatory needs, and the ineffable interplay of personalities within your four walls.
Necessarily, there will be periods of adjustment with each new micro-credentialing program you set up.
The success of your programs may depend on the ability of everyone involved to work through these periods of apparent uncertainty.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
When everyone involved has a desire for the micro-credentialing program to work, it is all but certain to be productive.
The way to ensure this is to see that everyone realizes what they have to gain by pushing for the success of the program.
The Sponsor's purpose is to advocate for the best interests of the micro-credentialing course itself.
She or he will work to keep the project focused on the development of a quality program, one that is built on the development of meaningful skills and knowledge, addresses the needs of various types of learning styles, and brings the learner to a meaningful and clear point of completion.
The Sponsor is a lot like the captain of the ship.
The Sponsor is the boss, she is responsible for the effectiveness of everyone else on the team, and she will be held accountable for the final result.
As anyone with long experience in management knows, this kind of apex accountability and authority is a proven ingredient for a successful organization.
That being said, this role can be tailored to meet your unique needs.
For clarity, much of this authority will manifest in tasks like curating and qualifying content, advertisement, and promotion of the program.
The sponsor is the voice of the brand of the micro-credentialing program and speaks not only for its needs but for what it is.
In this way, the Sponsor can be thought of as the "branding bible" for the micro-credentialing program being created and run.
The Sponsor represents the micro-credentialing program itself.
She is its voice, and tone, and represents its interests.
Her role is to give a face to the program itself, lend a human effect to what we are trying to achieve, and actively steer the program in a direction that is best for the program itself.
If the Sponsor is like an architect, then the Designer is like an engineer.
Where the Sponsor's ideas may run afoul of technological or other limitations, the designer's job is to design the practical framework for the course in a way that fits the Sponsor's ideals as closely as possible.
When the Sponsor calls for a specific course of action, the Designer's role is usually to find a practicable way to make it happen.
The conflicts inherent in this dynamic are clear.
But it's through those conflicts that optimal direction and design will come together for the greatest effect.
The Designer and the team working under him are paving the road ahead of the Sponsor as the program moves forward.
That being the case, the Designer's team needs the expertise, technical competence, and experience to fill out this role fully.
Likewise, the Designer needs all of these kinds of practical skills and abilities to be able to oversee the team in a meaningful and effective way.
With the ability to bring all this technical and practical expertise to bear, the Designer should be able to work with the Verifier and the Issuer closely to both help them and to be helped by them.
Further, the Designer's role can often be to represent the expectations of the Sponsor to these other two program leaders.
The Verifier's job may sound simple, but it is a mission-critical part of any complete micro-credential development team.
The Verifier is similar to a product tester.
But he or she also has a level of educational and technical expertise to support their observations and ideas with useful guidance.
Far from a mere end-point use-tester, the Verifier is there to make sure that the programs that are being set up will function as desired and as expected.
The Verifier should have a high degree of pedagogical expertise, and an understanding of how teaching works, how it happens, and what the expected results should deliver.
As an expert in professional development, the Verifier should be able to look at the program as it exists and develop a meaningful assessment of its effectiveness.
Further, he or she should be able to make remedial recommendations for aspects of the program that need to be reformed.
In these duties and responsibilities, an aspect of the Sponsor is present.
The Verifier can be seen as an advocate for the Sponsor, or even as an extension of the Sponsor herself.
The Verifier brings a more technical view to bear on some of the finer points of the program.
The Sponsor, conversely, takes a more panoramic view.
The issuance and tracking of educational accomplishments are as important to the functioning and development of micro-credential programs as they are to any educational system.
Awards must be meaningful and valuable.
Records must be trustworthy, and reliable, and match the form and content of similar records from other systems of workforce development.
How micro-credential awards are issued and the reasons for their issuance may be as important as everything we have discussed so far combined.
This means that the Issuer must be knowledgeable and competent in nearly the entire process, minus most of the technical aspects.
Record keeping is key to the process.
Without effective recording, all of our efforts are for not.
The learners will lose their credits.
The company will lose the authority it gains, and everything will need to be either abandoned or duplicated.
The Issuer, therefore, is indispensable.
The technical side of these processes should be fully leveraged to ensure credentialing and verification are secure and persistent.
Having looked at each role in brief, we should understand that each has its nuances, best practices, skills, and challenges.
Each role is as distinct from the others as it is built to enmesh functionally with the others effectively.
As we assemble these teams, we need to discover and be mindful of:
Having recognized the specialization of each role, they must all have a degree of overlap that can be shifted/established as you and your team work toward full integration.
Understanding these roles and their inherent flexibility is going to be key to your micro-credentialing success.
That being the case, working with a trusted, competitive micro-credentialing platform for consulting and integration support will likely be essential.
Once you have worked through a full implementation and arrived at a desirable result, you may be able to go it alone.
But your trusted micro-credentialing experts can be there to support you as long as you need them.