Micro-credentials: Can We Get Through the Teenage Years?

There is no denying it. Micro-credentials are having a moment. Everyone wants in. I spoke at the the Badge Summit in Boulder, Colorado last week where attendees were asked if this is their first time attending the summer camp for folks working on micro-credentials. It seemed like most hands shot up, newbies from ed-tech, colleges, state policy shops, non-profits. Our field is expanding. They all see the value proposition.

Learners, employers and colleges have come around to the idea that shorter, targeted units of education will increase job prospects, reduce training time and solve for declining enrollment. Now the question is: Will these useful, targeted learning units make it to adulthood without flaming out? IMHO, it feels like we are now arriving at the senior prom stage of the teenage years (although not in a limo). We stand on the precipice, where our parents take our photos. Everyone looks hopeful. We are hopeful.

This was my topic when it was my turn to speak last week. I described the teenage years through which the micro-credential movement has careened over the past 10 years and urged its diehard cheerleaders to get ready to move to the adult table. The Badge Summit seemed an appropriate venue, as it was the 10^th anniversary of this gathering.

I think about how far we have come since I sat in rooms and even at the Department of Education early in the 2010s, listening to plans to issue a “badge” for everything, to help folks capture formal learning, but also to show they participated in a conference or an after-school program.

I championed the concept as I fondly recalled my own Girl Scout merit badges. How proud was I to earn the Pen Pal badge which cemented a life-long friendship with my cousin.

Fast forward. Today “micro-credentials” (the term I now try to stick to) have grown up, but they don’t live up to our evolved definitions of them: “short, focused educational programs that verify a person's competence in a specific skill or set of skills.” (That’s Google Gemini’s definition.) Let’s face it. We are still throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall.

Let’s take a quick romp through the last decade to see how the teenage years have gone and what’s next.

1. Tween Years: Last Moments of Innocence ( 2011-2014):

The 2011 publication of the "Open Badge System Framework" powered by Mozilla was considered a pivotal moment, marking the beginning of widespread awareness and development of digital badging systems.

While the framework brought consistency to how to organize the data for and issue digital badges, the early mindset was “Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom.” Everything’s a badge. Activity and gamification badges were not well differentiated from short form skill validation credentials, but the groundwork was being laid for some excellent infrastructure and a, mostly, public spirited access vision about the empowering possibilities for humans if we could own a dynamic digital record of our skills and learning.

2. Puberty : Promising Signs of Adultification (2016-2018)

Early signs that micro-credentials carried signaling power, at least for badge earners and organizations like IBM, which reported using micro-credentials in job promotion decisions. We also began seeing employers wake up to the possibility of skills-based hiring. Groups like Education Design Lab began working with employers to credential durable skills to test whether they would use them in hiring decisions.

3. The “Failure to Communicate” Years: (2019-2023)

Many teenagers stop communicating with their parents at some point to test their independence. The micro-credentials movement struggled as many new providers entered the scene, doing their own frameworks, often in closed environments, preventing credential earners from carrying their credentials with them.

By 2022, the non-profit Credential Engine estimated a staggering 1 million separate credentials. And with 59,000 providers, the system felt like the Wild West despite efforts to sharpen the signals between employers and learners. Many credentials being created didn’t validate skills, per se. Grow With Google entered the playing field with some immediately popular certificates, which were more like short form courses. They advised that these weren’t specifically certifications. Were they micro-credentials? We realized the field was getting crowded and the language needed clarity.

Meanwhile, Credential Engine was gaining ground to classify as many credentials as possible using an open and linked transparency language (CTDL), with the goal being to provide a sorting mechanism for states and product developers, or any group to make sense of credentials.

4. The Senior Prom: Launching Into Adulthood? 2025

I loved my senior prom, although my boyfriend got a speeding ticket. An adult wake up call.

I’ve been watching the enrollment numbers grow every year, 28% growth for short term certificates since 2019, pretty much the fastest growing form of college enrollment. This year we saw that 12% of all credentials earned in the US were certificates rather than degrees, and that’s only the ones colleges are tracking. Industry groups don’t share their numbers for competitive reasons.

The adult wake up call for micro-credentials came a few weeks back. And it’s connected to transparency. Congress passed legislation tucked away in the OBBB (One Big Beautiful Bill). Starting next year, (as I advocated in my book), low-income college students can use their Pell grants to pay for short term programs, as short as eight weeks, but colleges have to report whether those programs lead to better job outcomes compared to if learners went straight to work. The legislation also requires all colleges to justify majors and programs based on the earnings power they create. I believe this will cause colleges to promote the short-term programs that create quick economic gains. For example, a radiation tech certification leads to a quicker, more easily reportable salary gain compared to an English major.

Finally, I believe AI will strengthen the value of micro-credentials. AI will be both a reason and a helpmate to shorten learning cycles. The skills employers care about can change quickly but colleges have struggled to create new curriculum as fast. For instance, I had one artificial intelligence professor tell me recently that it would be almost fraudulent to offer a master’s in AI at the moment, because of the rapid pace of change in the industry. His construct is to offer a series of micro-credentials that he designs for each semester as the field changes. Mind-blowing.

So, we got to the high school prom. What’s next? What needs to happen if we expect micro-credentials to belong at the adult table alongside degrees? I pitched these three pet projects to the Badge Summit insiders and I will leave you with them.

1. The credential part of micro-credentials needs to validate skill.

We are getting the micro part right, but not the “credential” part. Far too few micro-credentials determine skill in any way that the learner can describe or the employer can see. Part of the problem is that our language is undisciplined. We are using badge, certification, certificate, micro-credential interchangeably. They are not the same.

2. We need to “certification-ize” the rest of job roles.

By my back of the envelope calculation, about 30% of job roles have “real deal” industry certifications that can get you hired, or in many cases are required for licenses and employment. They range from CPR for lifeguards to food prep handling for kitchen staff to tech certifications for working in a data security center. COMP-TIA is probably the best example of an industry group that figured out how to become the tech field’s vendor-neutral standard for hiring certifications. Here’s the progression of stackable certifications for the data security tracks. I interviewed one student who got the specialist certs in high school and got hired by AWS without a degree.

More industries need to come together to figure these hiring signals.

3. Colleges need to move to a stepladder approach

We should be able to attend college in parts or as a whole. That is the antidote for affordability and for students who want to test out a field. Or pivot. But the key to this flexibility is credentials that signal skill mastery and job readiness on each step of the ladder.

The Badge Summit will hold its virtual version of the Summit on Aug 5.

See Kathleen’s Book info “Who Needs College Anymore?”