Working small – and thinking big

Steve Osborne is Principal Lecturer in Professional & Workplace Development at Cardiff Metropolitan University and chairs QAA's Micro-credentials Special Interest Group – a cross Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland tertiary network funded by Medr, the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research in Wales.

I originally became interested in the world of micro-credentials through my work in employability and professional development. I'd progressed into higher education from a career in management roles in the sports industries – and have for a long time been interested in strategies to support workforce development and to address what we used to call skills gaps – but which we might now more usefully think of as skills and knowledge mismatches.

What do you do for example, when as a highly qualified and experienced specialist in anything from sports science to geology, you find yourself promoted to a senior executive position in your organisation and are suddenly managing large numbers of people and large budgets, or working to address complex legal and regulatory requirements?

Between 2017 and 2020, I was working with other academic colleagues and the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA) to discuss how we might support the existing workforce in accessing forms of training appropriate to the fulfilment of new roles – and it was these discussions that led me straight into the realm of micro-credentials.

The more I explored and came to understand this world, the more I started to see alignments with my own work in sports management.

So, in response to a funding call released by HEFCW I supported senior managers at my university to formulate a proposal to develop exploratory work in this area.

At the same time, I had been leading a European ERASMUS+ collaborative project with European Universities and Employer organisations exploring sport management workforce development and skills issues similar to those we see in Wales and across the UK.

Our HEFCW-funded project deliberately recognised that the development and scaling of this kind of provision would require a graduated approach. How, we asked ourselves, could a higher education institution design and deliver micro-credentialled provision that could eventually grow to be stacked into a certificated 'macro' qualification?

It was evident that the first thing we'd need would be to develop a robust blueprint, one which encompassed regulations, quality processes and resourcing strategies – from delivery modes through to the licensing of library materials and mechanisms for student support.

It helped a great deal that, at the point that our project had gone live, QAA published its Characteristics Statement for micro-credentials. HEFCW – and now Medr – have stated that Baseline Regulatory requirements for higher education should consult with all Characteristics Statements – and so reviewing this statement as soon as it was released helped us plan how we'd manage the decisions we'd need to make – and gave us guidance that we could explore and test as we developed our approaches to this provision.

The first thing we did was to deconstruct our perspective on quality processes, returning to some essential principles.

Stage one of this was to ensure that the development of any micro-credentialled offer should be based upon a coherent needs analysis. The rationale for any such provision – and its modality and resourcing – should be determined primarily by the reality of researched market demand.

Our pilot studies, implemented with the support of HEFCW funding, were delivered in the areas of sports management and in exploring their potential with allied health and social care employers and agencies.

The market in these areas dictated the modality, resourcing and support mechanisms which would be appropriate for each area of provision. The potential scale of demand in both sectors highlighted the need to develop new programmes, but the modality of provision (online versus in-person or blended) would be dictated by local, regional and national workforce and occupation concentrations.

The second stage of our pilot asked how you engage with, and adapt, the processes and procedures which an institution already has in place for all other formers of provision. This included everything from approval protocols and ongoing quality assurance and enhancement structures to regulatory frameworks. How, for example, do you integrate into student voice mechanisms learners who might only spend a few months studying with you? And how do you measure impacts and graduate outcomes?

Then you need to consider resourcing and student support – everything from mental health and financial support to access to IT and library resources – and how you establish and proportionally allocate those resources, and make them work, for a learner who will be with you for, say, just 12 weeks.

All of this, of course, necessitated a great deal of consultation, discussion and negotiation. We were fortunate to have some very talented professional services staff, academic staff and senior managers willing to look for innovative solutions and scrutinise our efforts as we progressed towards workable and scalable solutions.

As we moved into the delivery of this provision, and its evaluation and enhancement, we discovered the real ongoing value of our initial needs analyses and our consultations with employers.

What has resonated from our experience of this delivery and our engagement with industry is the importance of offering sufficient flexibility to guide and support employees towards the development of qualifications over time – and the capacity to gradually stack micro-credentials into macro-qualifications.

This requires both within and between providers the ability to support credit accrual and credit transfer through the recognition of prior credit-bearing learning and prior experiential learning. Many institutions' regulations already accommodate this.

Employers and employees have been particularly interested in the accreditation of non-traditional learning experience (known as the Recognition of Prior Experiential Learning, or RPEL) – a way of validating years of professional experience. This process tends to require the learner's submission of a portfolio demonstrating how they met the relevant module's learning outcomes through evidence of professional experience and a reflective account. It's about encouraging learners and facilitating their learning by avoiding the unnecessary duplication of effort and study.

The promotion of coherent and integrated credit transfer strategies has been made easier by the focus of recent QAA publications on this subject – and we're now increasingly seeing providers working together in this area to move towards the harmonization of regulations and approaches to credit frameworks.

We've previously seen this kind of cooperation in relation to traditional – 'macro' – qualifications – so there's no reason it can't work for micro-credentialled provision.

But we should acknowledge that these institutional coalitions aren't always easy, and we need to continue having these conversations as to how we harmonize our approaches to micro-credentials in consistent and coherent ways. The involvement of professional bodies in specific subject areas may also help to align these processes more smoothly.

These conversations and collaborations should take place across the entire tertiary sector and its range of providers. We're also already starting to look beyond national boundaries, exploring how such harmonization strategies might work across Europe. There is a real interest in progressing this, and a will to make it happen.

Indeed, micro-credentials are global. It may take a lot more work outside Europe, but there's a strong appetite out there – especially when we consider the growth of online provision – and particularly (for those of us in anglophone nations) in terms of transatlantic partnerships and collaborations with Australasian institutions.

There are hotbeds of such interest across the world. That's one reason why we formed QAA's Micro-credentials Special Interest Group – to stimulate and support those conversations.

Recent developments in industrial strategy, across the nations of the UK and across the world, have made those conversations more pertinent and their need more urgent. We're going through a period of industrial restructuring, driven both by an increasing awareness of the importance of sustainable development and by new technologies, most obviously artificial intelligence. Our workforces are going to need new competencies and skillsets which don't currently exist. Access to flexible high-quality education and qualifications will be critical.

Micro-credentials won't of course fix everything. But they'll play a significant role in a broader holistic professional development framework – one which must come to encompass the varied forms of formal, informal and experiential learning.

Clearly defining what micro-credentials are – and what they're not – will continue to be essential for learners, employers and providers. That clarity is key: we need to work sensitively and collectively as educators to make it easily understandable to all.

That's one of the biggest challenges for providers – and for policymakers.

Higher education must communicate effectively with governments, industry, learners and prospective learners in order to identify demand – and then to transform that demand into lasting and concrete impact.