Students expect education to improve their job
prospects. At the same time, employers want job candidates who have acquired
the high-tech skills and qualifications as they enter the job market.
This is causing a shift away from the traditional
college degree and toward credentials, such as online badges, course
certificates, and dynamic assessments, according to Aaron Skonnard, CEO of the
online training provider Plurasight. In a post for TechCrunch, Skonnard predicted that credentials will at least be as
relevant as the college degrees because they offer “more insight into hard
skills.”
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) got the discussion started
by making higher education somewhat more accessible. Completion rates proved to
be an issue, so MOOC providers adapted and expanded beyond free education to create
training and certification programs that use credentials for skills that
employers want.
“We live in a time of real-time analytics, and we
dashboard everything inside the organization, from sales to operation costs to
customer sentiment,” Skonnard wrote. “It’s only natural that this trend should
extend into the way we vet, assess, and track the skills and abilities of our
prospective and current employees. The more data options we have, the more
deliberate we can become about making good hiring decisions, and the more
prescriptive we can be about addressing monumental skills gaps in the workplace.
The college degree alone can’t provide this kind of holistic insight.”
