As artificial intelligence and associated technologies extend their influence in our society, the role of higher education must change. We can no longer prepare learners for static careers in unchanging fields.

We are in the midst of profound change in the nature of employment worldwide. Fueled most recently by the pandemic, the nature of work, including our tools and practices, is undergoing dramatic changes. The Great Resignation, in part, reflects an understanding that many jobs do not have a viable future and that they are not best utilizing the abilities of the employees.

Jobs are on the verge of being altered or replaced by artificial intelligence and AI-assisted programs. Long gone are the years in which colleges prepared students for 30 years in a single career where few changes took place in the job itself. Turnover is rampant. The median length of time that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was just 4.1 years, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in January 2020. Likely, that number has gone down further during the Great Resignation.

We are all familiar with the robotic revolution of prior decades in which assembly-line work positions were lost to robotic assembly lines. That shakeout took a toll on a skilled but less educated population. Human skills were no longer needed because “intelligent” robots could do the job faster, more consistently and at a lower cost to the business. Now, Brookings warns us that the most vulnerable jobs of the future are in better paid and better educated fields: “Our analysis shows that workers with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree. Holders of bachelor’s degrees will be the most exposed by education level, more than five times as exposed to AI than workers with just a high school degree.”

I understand that there is much more to be made of a college degree than merely a trade school preparing the student for work. However, in the current economy, it is abundantly clear that students seek jobs, career advancement and career potential far above all other forms of enrichment and perspective. Yet, as Jeff Selingo points out, “The world of work has changed, while colleges, along with employers, are living in a different era. It’s nearly impossible anymore for colleges to arm students with the vocational hard skills they’ll need to last more than a few years in almost any job after graduation. Most of college graduates’ 20s are spent moving from job to job to further their education and learn additional skills. And the paradox is that job hopping is the primary reason employers are reluctant to invest in workers in the first place.” That reluctance to invest in new workers is further fed by the advancement of less costly, more flexible and easily upgradable AI.

To a significant degree, the AI marketplace is responsive to shortfalls in the number of qualified workers. That is, where employers cannot find an adequate supply of humans to meet their needs, they will turn to AI. Boston Consulting Group sees the near-term future in this area is to engage government, companies and higher education:

To reduce the mismatch in skills, governments should update the education system. They should create more flexible institutions that can anticipate the future needs of companies and refocus on meta skills. Companies need to invest in corporate academies, training partnerships, and constant upskilling and reskilling of their existing workforces. They should also transform their HR functions and processes to cater to the shift in approach needed to hire and retain talent with the new skills in demand. Companies that make these investments and significant changes in their own processes stand to gain a substantial competitive advantage over those that stick with their current approach. Countries that leverage education to create attractive locations for companies will gain a competitive edge over their static neighbors.

Continuing and professional education is thriving both at universities and within the corporate environment. The rise of certificate programs is unprecedented. This is not taking place in a carefully orchestrated fashion. There is no semblance of an organized, concerted effort to identify emerging and future needs, assign specific standards across industries, and subsidize quality programs to meet the changing needs across the economy. Instead, there is more of a Wild West approach with individual universities and corporations creating their own entrepreneurial programs. In too few cases, states or corporate groups are trying to draft a road map to meet the learning needs in industries.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence promises to transform 500 million white collar jobs in the next five years! The higher education–industry disconnect will take a huge toll on graduates in the workforce who have not been updated and upskilled for the emerging economy. This will further dilute the credibility and perceived value of degrees as they become increasingly outdated and irrelevant.

We need leadership within and across institutions to meet this challenge. A hodgepodge of credentials does not serve learners well. Clarity and specificity in outcomes as well as clear linkages to viable careers are needed to build effective paths of learning that meet the needs of today and tomorrow. Industry has already begun building its own education frameworks to meet its needs. Notably, the Google Career Certificate program has enrolled millions at an economical price point.

Who is leading the charge at your institution to respond to this massive shift in learning needs for our economy? Can you play a role in bringing coherence and meaningful alignment to inter-institutional/industrywide standards for certificate programs to meet the emerging new economy most effectively?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog. 

A tsunami of alternative credentials is emerging to meet the shifting learning needs of those in the workforce. Higher education is looking beyond the dwindling market of 18-year-olds to lifelong, professional and continuing ed to sustain enrollments.

One million fewer students are enrolled in higher education in the U.S. than before the pandemic began. As Nathan M. Greenfield writes in University World News, “Even though much of America’s economy opened up in 2021, America’s university-aged cohort continued to stay away from college and university in record numbers. The number of students enrolled in post-secondary institutions fell 2.7% in 2021, a figure greater than the previous year’s decline of 2.5%. Compared with 2019, there are almost one million fewer students in America’s colleges and universities.”

With fewer students, many universities are grappling with lower overall tuition revenue to sustain their operations. In part as a result of the decline in enrollments and associated revenue, many institutions are scrambling to launch alternative credentials to tap the massive shift of adult learners in the workforce, including those who are part of the “great resignation” and have quit their jobs during the pandemic.

As John Steele of Suitable writes, the alternative credential movement accelerated through the advent of MOOCs over the past decade. Reaching professionals online, the MOOCs provided credentials, including badges, that served those seeking to advance their careers.

The trend toward smaller-than-degree credentials has taken off. Compared to degrees, they are valued for their timeliness, relatively low cost and lesser time investment. The return on investment is apparent in short order, as certificate holders claim enhanced skills and abilities worthy of greater salaries and responsibilities.

Now there are literally thousands of alternative certificate programs, and they are growing daily. Most recently, Arizona State University announced ambitious plans to reach 100 million learners by 2030 through its new online global management and entrepreneurship certificate program. Natalie Schwartz writes in Higher Ed Dive, “The certificate program, which will be translated into 40 languages, will be offered through Arizona State’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. An initial donation of $25 million is helping to fund the program, which will make the certificates free to learners through full scholarships. Learners will receive a badge after completing each of five graduate-level courses in the program. Completion of all the courses leads to a certificate granting 15 credit hours that can be applied to degrees at Thunderbird.”

While it may seem relatively easy to throw together a few classes that have identifiable market-driven skills and abilities as learning outcomes, in practice creating a successful certificate program involves much more. There is a temptation to merely scan the available demographic data on projected job growth and student interest to drive the design and launch of a new certificate program. However, the most important link in the process is to reach out to business, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and industry leaders to create a long-term, continuing, working collaboration on identifying the needed skills, knowledge and abilities.

The keys to developing a successful online certificate program include:

1. Know your audience. Get to know the prospective students. These may well be those already employed in the field who are seeking career advancement. Your rolls of alums may offer a good starting point to seek out representative samples of these prospective learners. Identify their goals, aspirations and expectations.
2. Know the employers. Make sure you include the obvious ones in business and industry, as well as the less obvious ones, including those in government agencies, NGOs and education at all levels. The C-suite and HR leaders at regional and national companies and organizations may be best positioned to predict the specific knowledge, skills and abilities they will be seeking in the coming couple of years.
3. Understand the growth/decline potential. Get to know both the optimistic and the pessimistic sides of predictions for the fields in which your certificate holders will compete.
4. Update and revise content every year. Engage the professionals at least a couple of times a year to pick up on new developments and emerging trends that your certificate should address.
5. Teach to the future not the present or past. This is especially important in certificates. Too often we in higher education have been guilty of relying too heavily on textbooks that are already out of date when they are first published. We tap the way things were when we were working in the field, not the way things will be in six months or a year. This means that courses must be updated once or twice every year, without exception.
6. Design and market to a tightly defined underserved or unserved audience. You can leave room for others who may join your cohorts, but make certain you satisfy your core demographic group very well.
7. Carefully follow learning initiatives, such as the Google Career Certificates program for effective practices in teaching as well as placing your certificate completers.
8. Recognize that the pedagogy of teaching a short sequence of classes for a certificate is far different from a long-term degree program. The learners come to you with differing assumptions, defined desired outcomes and context.

Think of the certificate curriculum as existing in an ever-changing environment. It is not a static set of learning outcomes. Your collaboration with professionals in the field is the anchor for your success in this field. Designing courses for these learners is different without the long list of prerequisites and shared gen ed of degree programs. Artificial intelligence, virtual environments and the changing economy will impact what and how you should teach.

UPCEA offers a free curated reading list on alternative credentials with one item posted every day. It may be useful as you seek to keep up with the developments in this field.

Who is leading the certification effort at your institution? As enrollments shift from freshman-centric to professional-oriented, how can you help? It is time for a certificate in your field?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.