MICRO-CREDENTIALS AND THE SKILLS CHALLENGE
What’s Next for Micro-Credentials?
To be an effective, focused response to the skills and productivity challenges Canada faces, micro-credentials must be:
- Industry supported with an agreed competency-based assessment
- Available on demand — anytime, anywhere — and short (days or a few weeks rather than semesters or year-long)
- Leading to demonstrable skills and capabilities, not just additional knowledge (“knowledge in use” is what employers are looking for)
- Portable and valued by employers anywhere in Canada or around the world, not just a small number of employers in a local community
- Connected to a larger competency framework so that a single micro-credential can be stacked with others to provide a pathway to ongoing skill and competency development
The key to unlocking the potential of micro-credentials is what’s known as backward design: designing competency-based assessment based on agreed industry or employer needs and then curating learning activities that enable an individual to garner the knowledge, skill and capabilities to complete the assessment.
Few existing micro-credentials are designed this way or include rigorous multi-media competency assessments.
In a previous post on teachonline.ca, 10 specific next steps were suggested to ensure the micro-credentials funded by government or industry actually address the skills and productivity challenge they were designed to address. This thinking is reinforced in an article in Research Money. What learners need is access on demand to short, focused, competency-driven and assessed opportunities for learning.
But micro-credentials are just part of the response to the skills and productivity challenge. We need other responses, too:
Expanding places in existing programs
For example, Ontario is making new investments ($54.7 million) to expand personal support worker (PSW) training, with 4,000 new places in Ontario’s private colleges and at six Indigenous institutes (an additional $34 million). This is a targeted investment aimed at reducing a skills shortage. Ontario is also funding the expansion of nursing education, including funding for Georgian College to offer a new Bachelor of Nursing degree, as well as $342 million over three years to expand the hiring of nurses.
New pathways to skills and certification
In terms of new pathways, The Future Skills Centre is investing in a range of projects that use alternative learning pathways to skill and upskill workers. For example, Indigenous and northern-based forestry workers can now access immersive training using image and video technology that can be easily modified by instructors to provide superior, culturally appropriate learning experiences. An education toolkit will be developed, tested and deployed in the pilot delivery of three courses.
Public-private partnerships
Many private colleges have developed clear pathways to college diplomas or university programs. In British Columbia, for example, Sprott-Shaw College (founded in 1903, five years before UBC) has a clear pathway through its diploma in business to a BBA at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). Equally, many public colleges have clear pathways to degrees offered at universities, including Cambrian College with 232 pathways from its certificates and diplomas to Canadian universities.
New program domains
New program areas, such as assessments and courses linked to the competency framework for climate change adaptation or to the development of a competency and learning framework for the emerging blue economy, are emerging with new approaches to teaching and learning. The key to these emerging skill domains is to base them on a systematic view of what competencies are required and how they would be assessed, which is backward design.
Immigration and skills
Canada is expanding its annual immigration targets to more than 500,000 a year by 2025, with 60% of immigrants to be in the skilled worker category. Key to this is the rapid recognition of their skills, especially in professions and recognized trades. In addition to support for essential skills and skills for success, on-demand competency assessments against agreed national competency frameworks would speed up the ability of immigrants to enter the workforce and make full contributions to their chosen field of work.
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The challenge deserves a systematic, Canada-wide, coordinated response. It is time for a cold, hard look at micro-credentials and the skills agenda — something the Government of New Zealand (through NZQA) recently undertook for its own micro-credentials. It may be time for a co-ordinated national strategy linked to a national qualifications framework. Doing more of what we have always done and expecting different results is not going to solve Canada’s skills and productivity problem.
