High demand, structural changes in the business landscape and advances in information technology have led to new ideas about the continuing education field, including certificate and certification programs.

New digital and mobile capabilities, for example, have the potential to change the lifelong learning landscape. At the same time, working professionals are hungry for opportunities to acquire new skills and knowledge, and to be recognized for their competencies in multiple ways.

A New Roadmap for Professional Learners

The result: Technology and demand are changing how we think about higher education, continuous learning and certification. College or university study is no longer the end of the education road, but a springboard to lifelong learning.

 “Today, we live and work in a fast-paced world in which the only constant is change,” writes Mary Kyle in GoCertify.“The days where learning ended with college graduation are long gone. The adoption of an attitude of lifelong learning is a must for those seeking to retain peak skills and remain at the top of their profession.”

Sixty-three percent of adults who work full time or part time consider themselves “professional learners” and have taken a course or gotten additional training in the past 12 months to improve their job skills or expertise, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center study, Lifelong Learning and Technology.

Digital Credentials Change the Game

Higher education has taken notice of lifelong learning trends and the value of non-academic certifications that provide employers with more certainty about job candidates.

“The explosion in credentials is upending long-held notions about the value of a college degree,” claims The Chronicle of Higher Education writer Goldie Blumenstyk, in When a Degree Is Just the Beginning. Many of these credentials are in digital formats that can be easily shared among students, educators and employers in new kinds of e-portfolios or on commercial sites like LinkedIn.”

However, despite an educational ecosystem that is expanding dramatically, most adult professionals are not aware of new digital platforms and key resources that are available. For example:

• Digital badges that demonstrate someone’s mastery of an idea, skill or professional competency ― 83 percent of adults do not have much awareness of these.
• Massive open online courses (MOOCs) that are being offered by universities and companies ― 80 percent of adults do not have much awareness of these.
• Distance learning – 61 percent of adults have little or no awareness of this concept.

However, adoption is likely to increase rapidly as new digital platforms become more mainstream, predicts a Deloitte University Press report, The Lifetime Learner: A journey through the future of postsecondary education.

“This rich ecosystem of semi-structured, unorthodox learning providers is emerging at the edges of the current postsecondary world, with innovations that challenge the structure and even existence of traditional education institutions. These challengers are extending the education space beyond grades, degrees, and certificates to provide lifelong learning in a variety of formats and levels of effectiveness.”

Networked Learning

Deloitte identifies several innovations that have the potential to transform how we learn:

• Accessibility: Learning and content have been democratized by the internet, Deloitte notes. “In a networked era, learning can be more flow-oriented, opening both content and content creation to a larger pool of people.”
• Social learning: Social communities, combined with online content and resources, builds on the idea that “our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about the content rather than on the content itself.”
• Creation spaces: “Rather than focusing on a discussion on content, learners . . . work together to create their own content and gain new insights, while the creation space connects individuals to a richer learning environment that encourages interactions.”
• Warranting: Technologies, such as digital badging, that create new ways to warrant the quality of learning beyond grades, certificates, degrees and university reputation.

Networked Credentials

Innovators such as Mozilla Development Network, for example, recognizes people for skills they earn online and offline and beyond their time at universities. Websites such as Degreed touts: “The future doesn’t care how you became an expert,” and validates a range of learning experience. Accredible is an “edtech” service allows you to demonstrate your achievements, including self-directed learning, by creating personalized certificates.

Harvard Business Review writer Michael Staton, a partner at Learn Capital, a venture capital firm focused on education, believes disruptive changes are on the way to help evaluators make better assumptions about professionals and their ability to flourish on the job.

“The value of paper degrees will inevitably decline when employers or other evaluators avail themselves of more efficient and holistic ways for applicants to demonstrate aptitude and skill,” Staton concludes in his article, The Degree Is Doomed.  “Evaluative information like work samples, personal representations, peer and manager reviews, shared content, and scores and badges are creating new signals of aptitude and different types of credentials.”