Microcredentials are transforming professional development, offering fast, targeted learning that benefits both learners and organizations. For learning businesses such as associations and credentialing bodies, they represent a powerful way to drive engagement, build loyalty, and generate new revenue streams.
Specifically, these learning businesses can use microcredentials to:
Increase Learner Affinity:
Offer in-demand, skill-specific microcredentials that position your organization as the go-to source for relevant, professional learning.
Boost Long-Term Engagement:
Microcredentials offer accessible, modular learning, encouraging learners to return for new skills throughout their careers.
Generate Recurring Non-Dues Revenue:
By continually offering new microcredentials, you can create a steady stream of non-dues revenue while deepening your learner relationships.
In a fast-paced world, professionals need skills they can apply immediately—not years from now. That’s why microcredentials are surging in popularity. These short-term, skill-focused certifications help learners quickly gain and showcase valuable expertise without the time or cost of a full degree.
This demand is driving rapid growth:
For associations and credentialing bodies, this is a major opportunity. Microcredentials can help you attract new learners, deepen engagement, and generate new revenue streams.
In this guide, we’ll explain:
Let’s start with why demand for microcredentials is skyrocketing.
The growth of microcredentials is being driven by the needs of employers. Up to 44% of a worker’s skills may need updating to keep pace with evolving job requirements, and 70% of U.S. firms report talent or skills shortages. This has led employers to seek fast, targeted upskilling options for their teams.
But traditional degrees and certificates are too broad and time-consuming to fit this need. Employers want employees to gain specific skills quickly—without disrupting their workflow.
This is where the nimbleness of microcredentials really shines, allowing employees to add niche skill sets both quickly and cost effectively.
The Cybersecurity Fundamentals microcredential from ISACA, for instance, allows IT professionals to focus on a very narrow, but critical, aspect of their broader work. And at only eight hours of learning time and $160 for ISACA members, it’s a manageable and affordable way for learners to add those critical skills to their existing knowledge base.
This is why microcredentials are such an attractive option for employers. When current employees are able to get the updated skills they need quickly and easily, the company is able to save the cost and hassle of constantly recruiting new outside talent or funding traditional certification courses.
But it’s not just employers who like microcredentials. Employees have found a lot to love as well.
The job market is tightening, and companies have clearly indicated they’re looking for employees with deeper and more specialized knowledge and abilities. These two facts should serve as a clarion call to current employees and jobseekers alike: it’s time to upskill.
Microcredentials are a way for professionals to demonstrate additional competencies and therefore present themselves as more marketable. And one big reason for their broad popularity is that they represent a lifelong learning opportunity that spans the full employment horizon.
For both of these groups, microcredentials represent a more digestible and affordable pathway to further career opportunities than something like an advanced degree or a time-consuming certificate program.
Despite the appeal of microcredentials, however, many professionals may still be unsure about things like which offerings best align with their career goals or how to go about earning them. That’s where their association or credentialing body can step in.
Microcredentials are rapidly gaining popularity, but they remain a relatively new form of professional learning—a huge opportunity for learning businesses.
By offering clear guidance, identifying best-fit microcredential options, and helping learners advance their careers, organizations can become trusted leaders in this growing field.
Let’s explore three key ways microcredentials can benefit your organization.
Microcredentials may offer quick wins for learners and their employers, but the learning businesses offering them can enjoy benefits that last for much longer.
At this point, of course, they seek out additional microcredentials. This becomes a virtuous circle of revenue-generating opportunities for learning businesses, especially as individual success ripples out:
Happy learners are more likely to remain subscribed to email lists, which means they’ll see more offers for new classes and microcredentials.
As learners complete microcredentials, they often share their digital badges on social media, helping to increase awareness of the learning business among their professional networks.
Satisfied learners are more likely to recommend membership to colleagues and share how they gained new skills in professional settings, which helps promote the learning business.
Microcredentials offer a way for organizations to get new learners in the door. They also provide both new and existing learners with a compelling reason to stay engaged across their lifelong learning journey.
Despite their popularity, microcredentials aren’t something that a learning business can roll out overnight. It’s important to have a strong gameplan for showing learners why your offering is their best option.
As you set out to build a microcredential program, aim to answer these three questions:
Even the best microcredential content will fall flat if the learner experience is clunky. Your learning management system (LMS) isn’t just a delivery vehicle—it’s the engine that powers your program’s success.
Learners drawn to the convenience and manageability of microcredentials are certainly going to expect the same from the platform they’re using to earn them.
When it comes to education in this context, learners expect a multimodal learning experience that involves content delivery across multiple channels, including visual, audio, and text. And, most importantly, they want everything to be connected.
Today's learners expect:
Meeting the expectations of today’s tech-focused learner requires more than an ad hoc approach to your microcredential platform. Learning businesses looking to stand out as much for their easy-to-use tech as for their teaching will want to consider the streamlined convenience of an all-in-one LMS.
A unified LMS can help your organization provide personalized support to learners throughout the learning lifecycle—exactly why you’re probably looking to add a microcredential offering in the first place. A good LMS will seamlessly bring together many of the features and elements that can help you distinguish an attractive microcredential program including:
Content management capabilities that allow you to create new content quickly and easily, helping to ensure your microcredential offerings are always as current and relevant as possible.
Learning technology that highlights things like individualized learning pathways, progressive microcredential stacks, gamification options, and continuing education crossovers.
Data-driven insights, such as engagement metrics and at-risk warnings, that help you better understand your learners as they take their microcredential journey.
Administrative tools that make it easy to quickly launch new microcredential courses, analyze learner data to track engagement and progression, and keep your data secure.
Microcredentials are gaining popularity and it's clear why.
As companies scramble to meet the evolving demands of their fast-changing industries, they know they need their employees to quickly ramp up their capabilities. Employees, meanwhile, recognize that specialized skills not only make them more valuable to their current employers, but more attractive on the job market at large. Microcredentials fit the bill for both sides of this equation as a fast, manageable, flexible, and affordable way to upskill.
Associations and credentialing bodies are well-positioned to lead in this space, thanks to their trusted brands and industry expertise.
But in order to take advantage of this opportunity to both attract new learners and re-engage existing ones—and to enjoy the revenue boost that comes with it—learning businesses need to understand what it takes to develop and deliver a winning microcredential offering.
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