Students and employers want microcredentials – how can universities and colleges service this growing market?

The market for microcredentials in Canada and across the world is expanding, and the pace of growth is set to accelerate as workplaces and careers transform. Microcredential demand and supply is being driven by government and industry to address the rapidly changing skills environment and to support a shift to lifelong learning.

Before we explore what this means for Canadian higher education providers – both colleges and universities – it is worth taking time to understand the state of play.

A 2020 survey for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) was enlightening. It found that nearly 70 per cent of working-age Canadians were interested in the idea of short, skill-focused learning for professional development. Despite this interest in the concept, only one in four Canadians had ever heard of the term “microcredential” and even fewer knew what it referred to.

We also have HEQCO to thank for a robust definition of microcredential: “A micro credential is a representation of learning, awarded for completion of a short program that is focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes), and is sometimes related to other credentials.” (A quick style note – we refer to microcredential as a single word, but others like HEQCO break it in two.)

In Ontario, microcredentials have been around for well over a decade. There are now around 1800 microcredentials being offered across Ontario institutions, with more than 1200 eligible for financial assistance through Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), up from 600 just two years ago. And the Ontario government is on board – in 2020, it announced a C$59.5 million investment over three years to support microcredentials.

Throughout the industrialized world, the growing adoption of digitization, automation and artificial intelligence have impacted job security. While technological advances have more acutely affected the automotive and manufacturing sectors, many functions previously performed through skilled labor are at risk. COVID-19 has exacerbated job losses and individuals are keen to leverage offerings to re-enter the market.

Microcredentials are a nimble, effective and cost-efficient way for people to achieve or maintain competency. Newcomers can gain new skills via recognized training, current workers can upskill to keep pace with changing demands and individuals impacted by layoffs can be retrained. We saw the benefits in action in work Nous did with the Western Parkland City Authority in Sydney, Australia, where we developed a new education and training model with a consortium of universities to address key skills gaps for the region’s progress.

But universities and colleges would be naïve for thinking they have this market to themselves. There is a growing array of profit-seeking organizations – including Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, FutureLearn and edX – that are also trying to penetrate the market.

Universities and colleges must quickly mobilize to capitalize on the growing interest and funding available through government programs. The urgency is even greater when special pilot funding is made available, such as in the auto and advanced manufacturing sectors (generally offered at colleges) and education technology and digital learning environments (colleges and universities).

Given this context, we can be confident that interest in microcredentials will continue to grow. So how can universities and colleges tap into the market? Drawing on our experience working with educational institutions in several countries, we are pleased to share some guidance.

A key challenge facing universities in exploring microcredentials is where to focus limited resources. To date many microcredentials have been repackaged from existing online content, with a hit-and-miss approach to market entry.

Compared to undergraduate and postgraduate study, there is little publicly available data on microcredential demand. Without evidence of what types of students want to study what microcredentials, it’s challenging to make the case for investing time and resources on a coherent microcredential product portfolio.

We were pleased to work with RMIT, a university based in Melbourne, to develop a market and skills dashboard, which provided access to market data to inform the development of new qualifications. (You can find out more about this project on our website.)

In our experience across many projects there are multiple data sets that can help triangulate where to focus microcredential investments.

Coursera’s data on MOOC (massive open online courses) uptake is a useful way of assessing demand and potential revenue opportunities. Lightcast data on industry skills demand can point to emerging opportunities for both B2C and B2B microcredential offers.

And there is one other data source we believe offers unique intelligence on trends.

Studyportals is a global study choice platform, listing 200,000 courses at more than 3,750 educational institutes across 110 countries. Some 57 of Canada’s top universities, colleges and institutions are represented on the platform.

Data from Studyportals is particularly valuable for institutions, providing insights on student interest, including in local demand for short courses. Nous partners with Studyportals to provide clients with rich insights from this global data set about national and international prospective student demand and characteristics.

Studyportals data allows universities and colleges to explore market opportunities through revealed preferences. Using large-scale, real-time data on the short courses prospective students are most interested in provides rich insights about current and future demand.

To show the potential of the full array of data, we have identified areas for which students in Canada are searching for short courses and how demand is changing. While short courses in management studies and accounting have had the highest interest in the past three years, the pandemic has contributed to a significant increase in interest in short courses in public health and health sciences. 

This data is most impactful in identifying demand growth by being triangulated with prospective student characteristics (such as demographics, life stage, location and price points). This allows institutions to target microcredentials to maximize their reach and impact.

In combination, the rich insights from this data can be powerful in maximising the return on investment from a microcredentials offering. For universities eyeing growth opportunities, this data insight is worth its weight in gold.

Get in touch to explore how you can apply these approaches in your institution.

Prepared with support from Vishrut Shah, Zac Ashkanasy, Doron Chimes, Mia Juritzen, Keven Chen and Hamish Ride.

Connect with Nadia Feerasta and Peter Wiseman on LinkedIn.