In an ever-changing business environment, maintaining a skilled and adaptable workforce is essential to ensuring your organisation can meet its goals and remain competitive. With workplace learning becoming more and more important to business success, micro-credentials offer a pathway to help your workers develop the skills they need.
These short, accessible, and cost-effective courses serve to reskill or upskill oneself as a learner, or one’s workforce as an employer more easily and more quickly than ever before, providing the means to evolve with the dynamic world of work and stay ahead of the competition.
The Future of Jobs Report by the WEC (World Economic Forum) recently found that by 2025, half of all employees will need training to address a change in required skills; this means that organisations need to reinvent the way they nurture their workforce in terms of skills and knowledge acquisition.
So, how can micro-credentials enhance the value of your workforce and your organisation? Let’s have a look at 4 ways micro-credentials can benefit your organisation.
1) Upskilling your workforce to stay ahead of the game
Micro-credentials can be what sets your organisation apart from other organisations, and are an affordable way to develop your capabilities to meet changing industry needs.
With the help of the Guroo Learning team, the Blackmores Group was able to create and develop two micro-credentials for Pharmacists and Pharmacy Assistants that were rolled out across Australia and Asia. Blackmores identified the need for micro-credentials and the knowledge gap they could fill – the increasingly complex array of complementary medicine and questions from an increasingly well-informed customer base – so that Pharmacists and Pharmacy Assistants are now able to upskill and more confidently meet the demands of their job. Learn more about the success story here.
Courses and programs on more general topics such as data security, finance essentials, digital mastery and more are also crucial to the smooth functioning of any organisation and, in a micro-credentialed format, can be completed in a condensed, engaging and quick fashion.
2) Attracting job-seekers and talent
Switching careers and non-linear career paths are increasingly becoming the norm and so, there are more and more job-seekers looking to start afresh in a new department or even field altogether. Developing micro-credentials that can upskill new employees and reskill current ones can show you are an organisation that actively seeks to both bridge the growing skills gap and invest in your employees. This will naturally attract more job-seekers and by extension, more talent.
This was precisely the idea that IBM had in 2015 when they undertook a large-scale micro-credential upskilling program to attract more big data developers to IBM. In 2020, they reached the milestone of issuing their three millionth digital badge awarded for any one of 250,000 activities and have subsequently recorded increased employee performance, increased access to a wider talent pool, and reduced attrition.
3) Keeping employees happy and flourishing to minimise staff turnover
As the above point suggests, existing employees value a work culture that promotes lifelong learning, self-development, and the means for newly acquired skills to be recognised and quantified – expectations that micro-credentials are designed to meet. Micro-credentials are also an attractive alternative to expensive and time-expensive higher education degrees and, as they can be worked through on the job and applied instantly, it’s a win-win situation for both employee and employer. Yet another benefit is the pace and delivery (face-to-face, online, or blended) of micro-credentials that can be decided by you to suit the needs of your learners. In essence, employees whose skill progression and self-development are encouraged and prioritised will not only be more productive but are also more likely to remain in your organisation.
4) Boosting your employee's soft skillset
Possessing strong soft skills such as leadership, communication and conflict management skills are increasingly becoming non-negotiables in collaborative teamwork (if not all) environments. According to the Soft skills for Business Success Report by Deloitte, two-thirds of all Australian occupations will be soft skill intensive by 2030.
Micro-credentialed soft skill courses are not limited to effective communication and basic leadership skills. Other soft skills can include:
-
leading an organisation through dynamic environments and conflict,
-
negotiation strategies,
-
inclusive leadership
-
leading with emotional intelligence
-
operational risk and excellence,
-
resilience
and much more.
Through our partnership with the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, we deliver an array of micro-credentialed courses to countless organisations big and small so that the capabilities of their workforce can reflect their needs, motivations and goals as organisations. Read more here.
Guroo Academy can help you to deliver engaging micro-credentialed courses across your organisation - click here to find out more and get started creating better learning today.