ore than 50 million Americans have filed unemployment claims due to the COVID-19 pandemic—meaning all the jobs created since the Great Recession have been lost. Despite some unexpectedly good news in the latest federal jobs report, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the U.S. economy and American lives. And with new COVID-19 infections back on the rise in many U.S. states, things are unlikely to return to “normal” any time soon.
We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of the virus will be, but many will likely pursue upskilling and reskilling opportunities to increase their value in a dramatically altered job market. Recent findings from the Strada Education Network suggest that one in four Americans plan to enroll in education or training in the next six months. We also know that generally, a four-year degree is a good investment leading to increased lifetime earnings and a better quality of life. However, we don’t yet understand how well those skills will meet current value and demand parameters of this new employment marketplace.
This gap between what employers are looking for and what credentialled jobseekers have to offer existed before the pandemic, and the gap is widening. The degree as proxy for employment readiness has been increasingly called into question across disciplines, as skills have emerged as the currency of the digital economy. Big names including Microsoft, Netflix, Google, and Tesla have already announced a shift toward skills-based hiring. Exemplifying this trend, Google recently announced three new certificates that they will treat as equivalent to a four-year degree for relevant roles. Universities need to catch up.
Aligning Degree Programs to Workforce Needs
For too long, employers and jobseekers have struggled to find each other. Considering how much today’s learners and their families spend to get a four-year degree—student loan debt is at a staggering $1.6 trillion and counting—colleges and universities need to do a better job clearly signaling competencies their graduates have gained as an indicator of work readiness.
For more than 20 years, Western Governors University (WGU) has worked with employers to align degree programs to workforce needs. Over the last eighteen months, we’ve doubled down on that commitment by mapping the skills and competencies employers want into our course and program offerings. These maps are comprehensive collections of rich skills descriptions tagged to employment sectors, specific job requirements and labor market demand data. These comprehensive maps across industries form an “operating system” maximizing value for students by providing career-relevant programs and data-driven career assistance, as well as translating credentials and experience into the high-demand skills they represent.
This new approach enables the development of a learner-owned record of achievement for every WGU student that goes beyond the traditional academic transcript to include academic credit, certifications, work accomplishments, and a description of accumulated skills. As employers shift to placing more value on specific skills, the achievement record will document what a student can do, not just the courses they’ve completed.
Today’s jobseekers rely on a combination of résumés, job applications, and credentials to describe their skills and qualifications. This approach fails to capture the full range of skills that workers gain in the classroom and on the job. The learner-owned achievement record will act as a single profile that represents the entirety of an individual’s abilities and experiences, available on-demand.
The value of this new skills-centric approach is two-fold. Learners will gain real-time insights to the marketability of every skill and competency they gain; and these insights can be provided to learners and their mentors, helping them to consider career paths or options that may have otherwise gone unexplored.
For a university founded to increase pathways to opportunity, this clear connection to workforce skills and employment pathways is an obvious next step. By reimagining how we can empower our students to clearly signal the skills and competencies they’ve gained, we’ll provide our students with a powerful new set of tools they’ve never had before.
The Importance of Learner-owned Records of Achievement to Higher Education
Reimagining the value of a learner-owned record of achievement more broadly throughout higher education will allow learner/earners, across a lifetime and across educational and work experiences, to clearly demonstrate and stack earned targeted skillsets toward a more explicitly competitive profile in the knowledge economy. Further, it will allow admissions and hiring teams to more reliably award “credit” for capabilities developed outside the traditional formal academy, including apprenticeships, internships, training and professional certifications commonly offered by industry and military employers.
Compared with the sometimes harder-to-visualize goals associated with more traditional academic transcripts, a comprehensive achievement record surfaces tangible educational and labor market compassing tools and rewards that are attractive to students and can encourage them to persist in their education. We believe this approach will be especially important in meeting the needs of higher education’s fast growing population of working learners, as well as students who come to us from underserved and underrepresented communities where windows to high-demand jobs and careers may be lacking, as are actionable insights and networking intelligence around the most effective pathways for getting to these opportunities.
We don’t know what the lasting effects of COVID-19 will be, but we know that we can make changes today to better empower today’s learner-earners now and across a lifetime of achievement and social and economic mobility. That starts with providing learner-earners with insights into the jobs of the future and what skills and competencies they need to qualify for those jobs. No institution can take this on alone. This learner-centric future, able to readily connect talent with available opportunities, will require America’s higher education institutions, labor market insight providers, and employers to develop an open, collaborative information ecosystem, and to work together in unprecedented ways to support the nation’s workers and the future of our regional economies. COVID-19 may not be the impetus behind this critical imperative, but the pandemic is providing urgency to this call to action.
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Embracing a Skills-based Future
August 7, 2020
Embracing a Skills-based Future Is Now More Urgent than Ever.
M
ore than 50 million Americans have filed unemployment claims due to the COVID-19 pandemic—meaning all the jobs created since the Great Recession have been lost. Despite some unexpectedly good news in the latest federal jobs report, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the U.S. economy and American lives. And with new COVID-19 infections back on the rise in many U.S. states, things are unlikely to return to “normal” any time soon.
We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of the virus will be, but many will likely pursue upskilling and reskilling opportunities to increase their value in a dramatically altered job market. Recent findings from the Strada Education Network suggest that one in four Americans plan to enroll in education or training in the next six months. We also know that generally, a four-year degree is a good investment leading to increased lifetime earnings and a better quality of life. However, we don’t yet understand how well those skills will meet current value and demand parameters of this new employment marketplace.
This gap between what employers are looking for and what credentialled jobseekers have to offer existed before the pandemic, and the gap is widening. The degree as proxy for employment readiness has been increasingly called into question across disciplines, as skills have emerged as the currency of the digital economy. Big names including Microsoft, Netflix, Google, and Tesla have already announced a shift toward skills-based hiring. Exemplifying this trend, Google recently announced three new certificates that they will treat as equivalent to a four-year degree for relevant roles. Universities need to catch up.
Aligning Degree Programs to Workforce Needs
For too long, employers and jobseekers have struggled to find each other. Considering how much today’s learners and their families spend to get a four-year degree—student loan debt is at a staggering $1.6 trillion and counting—colleges and universities need to do a better job clearly signaling competencies their graduates have gained as an indicator of work readiness.
For more than 20 years, Western Governors University (WGU) has worked with employers to align degree programs to workforce needs. Over the last eighteen months, we’ve doubled down on that commitment by mapping the skills and competencies employers want into our course and program offerings. These maps are comprehensive collections of rich skills descriptions tagged to employment sectors, specific job requirements and labor market demand data. These comprehensive maps across industries form an “operating system” maximizing value for students by providing career-relevant programs and data-driven career assistance, as well as translating credentials and experience into the high-demand skills they represent.
This new approach enables the development of a learner-owned record of achievement for every WGU student that goes beyond the traditional academic transcript to include academic credit, certifications, work accomplishments, and a description of accumulated skills. As employers shift to placing more value on specific skills, the achievement record will document what a student can do, not just the courses they’ve completed.
Today’s jobseekers rely on a combination of résumés, job applications, and credentials to describe their skills and qualifications. This approach fails to capture the full range of skills that workers gain in the classroom and on the job. The learner-owned achievement record will act as a single profile that represents the entirety of an individual’s abilities and experiences, available on-demand.
The value of this new skills-centric approach is two-fold. Learners will gain real-time insights to the marketability of every skill and competency they gain; and these insights can be provided to learners and their mentors, helping them to consider career paths or options that may have otherwise gone unexplored.
For a university founded to increase pathways to opportunity, this clear connection to workforce skills and employment pathways is an obvious next step. By reimagining how we can empower our students to clearly signal the skills and competencies they’ve gained, we’ll provide our students with a powerful new set of tools they’ve never had before.
The Importance of Learner-owned Records of Achievement to Higher Education
Reimagining the value of a learner-owned record of achievement more broadly throughout higher education will allow learner/earners, across a lifetime and across educational and work experiences, to clearly demonstrate and stack earned targeted skillsets toward a more explicitly competitive profile in the knowledge economy. Further, it will allow admissions and hiring teams to more reliably award “credit” for capabilities developed outside the traditional formal academy, including apprenticeships, internships, training and professional certifications commonly offered by industry and military employers.
Compared with the sometimes harder-to-visualize goals associated with more traditional academic transcripts, a comprehensive achievement record surfaces tangible educational and labor market compassing tools and rewards that are attractive to students and can encourage them to persist in their education. We believe this approach will be especially important in meeting the needs of higher education’s fast growing population of working learners, as well as students who come to us from underserved and underrepresented communities where windows to high-demand jobs and careers may be lacking, as are actionable insights and networking intelligence around the most effective pathways for getting to these opportunities.
We don’t know what the lasting effects of COVID-19 will be, but we know that we can make changes today to better empower today’s learner-earners now and across a lifetime of achievement and social and economic mobility. That starts with providing learner-earners with insights into the jobs of the future and what skills and competencies they need to qualify for those jobs. No institution can take this on alone. This learner-centric future, able to readily connect talent with available opportunities, will require America’s higher education institutions, labor market insight providers, and employers to develop an open, collaborative information ecosystem, and to work together in unprecedented ways to support the nation’s workers and the future of our regional economies. COVID-19 may not be the impetus behind this critical imperative, but the pandemic is providing urgency to this call to action.
