Building microcredentials that work: what learners, educators, and industry are looking for.

Microcredentials promise a flexible way to address skills gaps by teaching and recognising the specific skills employers need, faster than a full degree can supply them. The question is whether the people who issue credentials, the learners who earn them, and the employers looking to hire and develop talent, understand what they mean, and how they bring value.

Over the last 10 months, the Siemens Skills for Sustainability Network (S4SN) has run a program of seminars, surveys, and industry interviews to answer this question. Almost 400 students, around 100 engineering educators, and a series of industry and HR experts told us what makes a microcredential worth completing, recognising, and using. One insight ran through every conversation: a microcredential only works as a signal if learners, educators, and employers all have a shared sense of its meaning and value. Today, they often do not.

Three groups, three perspectives

Each group asks different questions about the same credential. Learners ask, “Is this worth my time?” Educators ask, “Where does this fit in our system, and how do we integrate it?” Employers ask, “What does this signal mean, and can I trust it?” Each is willing to engage – but each needs to understand what microcredentials are, and how they might work in each particular context.

What learners need to see: is it worth my time?

The learner evidence is strongly pragmatic, but largely open to microcredentials. In our student survey, 98% of nearly 400 respondents rated short credentialed non-university courses as “very valuable” or “valuable.” The catch: 72% had not previously heard the term “microcredential.” Learners can recognise the value of short, recognised learning even when the label itself is unfamiliar.

When we asked students directly in our learner-focused Microcredential Completion Seminar, they described completion as a trade-off against the rest of their time. They want clear structure, an honest estimate of how long it will take, transparent costs, and evidence that the credential is recognised and transferable. As one student summed it up, it comes down to anticipated “sunk cost vs future value.”

What educators need to see: where does this fit?

Educators also see the value in microcredentials. In our educator survey, 97% of the 91 respondents rated short, credentialed courses as either very or somewhat valuable for student skills and the transition to industry. However, only 12% reported an institution-wide microcredential strategy, while almost half (47%) reported only limited use.

The issue isn’t a lack of interest, but rather the structure of institutions. Microcredentials have to fit into systems that weren’t built for small, modular, cross-boundary learning, while taking into account learning outcomes, assessment, credit, quality assurance, and sometimes professional-body expectations. As Jessica Silwick of ABET put it in our Recognising Microcredentials Across Systems Seminar,

“The question for me is no longer whether microcredentials can carry academic credit, it’s how intentionally institutions and organisations will design for it.“

Jessica Silwick, Chief Financial and Chief Operating Officer, ABET

What industry needs to see: what does this signal?

Industry is where the credibility gap is sharpest. Employers care about capability, but the evidence is that microcredentials are not yet being used consistently as a recruitment signal. Stephen Isherwood, Joint Chief Executive of the Institute for Student Employers (ISE), shared survey data showing microcredentials were used by only 8% of respondents for graduate hiring and 6% for school and college leavers, adding:

“People are so busy and time-pressured that they will only do things if it adds value. Value definition will be different for different people in different situations, but it’s got to have a meaningful output. It’s not just collecting qualifications for the sake of it.”

Stephen Isherwood, Joint Chief Executive of the Institute for Student Employers

Several interviewees pointed out that industry already operates in this space, just under different names such as continuing professional development, vendor certifications from companies like Cisco and Microsoft, professional-body competency frameworks, digital badges, and apprenticeships.

Microcredentials may be new as a branded category, but the underlying idea is not. The opportunity is not to invent something new; it’s to assemble familiar tools like quality assurance, digital badging, industry input, and stackable academic credit into a credential more people can read at a glance and usefully deploy.

How Siemens is responding

Siemens has been working on making microcredentials that are comprehensible across different groups for several years. That work has produced a growing portfolio of industry-co-designed microcredentials – Design for the Circular Economy, developed with the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and recognised by ABET; Expedite – Skills for Industry; and Expedite – Skills for Competitions – each built around a different audience and learning goal, with most hosted in the Siemens Academy collection on Coursera.

Design for the Circular Economy is a good example of how all of the three perspectives above come together. CU Boulder faculty manage the curriculum and the assessment, Siemens contributes subject-matter experts and case studies, Credly digital badges make the credential visible on LinkedIn, and ABET recognition provides an independent quality signal an employer can verify. Learners can earn a single badge, stack three into a specialisation, take the learning for academic credit, or continue toward a CU Boulder graduate certificate or master’s degree – multiple entry and exit points by design. The credential has now passed 30,000 enrolments.

Examples like this point to a wider question Chris Smith, Co-Chair of the SEFI Special Interest Group on Lifelong Learning, raised in our recent webinar: how do we scale this kind of practice across the system?

If we really want this to expand and get really wide-scale traction and scalability, we need to make it easy. For educators, easy to develop. For learners, easy to access and make decisions – that goes to the trust argument. And for industry, how do they have confidence in what comes out of this? If we get the systems right, we’ll enable a lot. That’s the history of technology: once we define standards, we get flexibility, because everybody knows what they’re talking about, and then can innovate.

Chris Smith, Senior Lecturer in Electronic Engineering, Glasgow Caledonian University and Co-Chair, SEFI Special Interest Group on Lifelong Learning

For Dora Smith, Senior Director of Future Workforce Strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, that shared understanding ultimately comes back to trust:

People need to trust this is something of value – this means something to them individually as a learner or an educator, and to an employer. That question of translation and language remains the most important piece this research shows we have to continue to address.

Dora Smith, Senior Director of Future Workforce Strategy, Siemens Digital Industries Software

Get involved

Our work on microcredentials continues, and we’d like institutions and companies wrestling with the same questions we’ve explored here to be part of a conversation on this crucial topic.

• Educators and institutions: Join the Skills for Sustainability Network to access the seminar series, share practice on integrating microcredentials, and shape what comes next.
• Industry partners and companies: Explore the Siemens and CU Boulder microcredential series on Coursera, read more about how Siemens designs industry-relevant, quality-assured credentials, and get in touch about addressing skills gaps in engineering through microcredentials.