Short, sharp and powerful: Why microcredentials are transformational
People are moving faster than education institutions in their appetite to undertake short, targeted courses that deliver highly specific skills that can benefit their careers, says Professor Peter Shergold.
Shergold, an eminent academic, company director and former senior public servant, who was for more than a decade the chancellor of Western Sydney University, is both a keen observer of the educational landscape and a hands-on disrupter of it.
“People are voting with their feet – or at least their fingers as they do microcredentials at home,” Shergold says.
David Gonski, left, and Peter Shergold, have played a major role in transforming post-school education. Kate Geraghty
In a major report for the NSW government, Shergold and business titan David Gonski mapped out what the future of education needed to be for those who had finished formal school education.
They argued that being employable was not enough – workers in the modern economy also need to be flexible, adaptable, confident and creative.
Shergold and Gonski noted while the vast majority of students now finish year 12, they are given three clear choices when they finish: get a job, go into vocational education or go to university.
While an ATAR is important, school leavers also need to step into the next stage of their lives with a profound understanding that their education was not concluding, but in many ways just beginning; that over a lifetime they would need to learn myriad new skills to remain relevant in a rapidly changing work environment.
The Shergold-Gonski review made several recommendations, among which included a new type of educational institution that married TAFE, university and practical work experience.
The institutes of applied technology (IAT) are the first educational institutions that have microcredentials embedded into the education experience.
The Institute for Applied Technology – Digital opened its doors at Meadowbank TAFE earlier this year. It brings together the University of Technology Sydney, Macquarie University, TAFE NSW and Microsoft. Salesforce, SAP and SAS have also come on board as industry partners, with more expected to join.
Tangible benefits
The Institute for Applied Technology – Construction will open at Kingswood in a few months and is seen as central to developing the skills for the vast commercial, business and residential development in and around the new Western Sydney Airport.
It is hoped that within four years, the two training centres will equip 26,000 people with advanced digital and construction skills.
Indeed, in a submission to the review of higher education currently under way and chaired by Professor Mary O’Kane, the digital institute noted that since it started offering microcredentials last November, there have been 12,000 enrolments, with more than 5000 students already having undertaken the five microskills on offer.
The five focus areas are data analytics, cybersecurity, cloud computing, software development and artificial intelligence.
“Student demographic information also suggests that the [the institute] is attracting a different type of learner than standard university or TAFE offerings, with 60 per cent of students between 30 and 49 years of age, and 71 per cent full-time employed,” the submission says.
“Encouragingly, given the predominance of men working in the IT sector, enrolments from women are high. For example, data analytics courses offered at the IAT-D have an even split between male and female students with overall student enrolments showing 41 per cent female participation.”
With the IATs taking off, Shergold says the benefits of embedding microcredentials into new education programs are tangible.
“Staff can do a bite-sized chunk of focused learning and then get it recognised with a badge which encourages them to keep on learning,” he says.
“And that is really important in the present labour market when you can see all these AI and predictive technologies are constantly changing the skills that are required.”
Shergold, as chair of Opal Healthcare, has seen first-hand the power of microcredentials to upskill a workforce. Staff are encouraged to take short courses to help understand the context of the work they do, as well as gain specific skills.
As he and Gonski were writing their report, they became increasingly to the conclusion that microcredentials – individually and collectively – were “transformational”.
“They allow us to bridge often unnecessary boundaries between academic higher education, practical vocational skills and employer work-based learning,” Shergold says.
Ultimately, the way schools focus on ATARs is too narrow and does not recognise other skills and abilities that students may have learned informally.
“The way ATAR is presently used in schools is profoundly distorting the educational experience, this focus on judging someone on a single number, a number that is intended for ranking,” Shergold says.
Shergold says attempts to wrangle microcredentials to fit into the government regulations for describing levels of formal learning from school to PhDs – the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) – might be misguided and missing the point.
“There is a whole range of microcredentials that will never fit into the AQF. Increasingly, people just do what they want to do and are useful for their careers. They don’t care about the AQF,” he says.
“And there is a danger of trying to make everything fit into the AQF you actually overregulate innovation and kill it off.”
Learners need to know the provenance of their course and have trust in the provider and the quality of the learning, but beyond that attempts to regulate microcredentials might be counterproductive.
“The value of microcredentials is that they are being recognised by business and that learners can engage in lifelong learning in a relatively inexpensive way,” he says.
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