KUALA LUMPUR (March 14): From digital marketing to stackable tech credentials, microcredentials are an important element in today’s working world. In this day and age, almost everyone has a diploma or degree, with a need for professionals and graduates to find other means to stand out from the crowd.

Although microcredentials have been around for a while, it has since shot to prominence during the pandemic as people used their idle time at home to upskill themselves. Not only does it improve a worker’s abilities at their job, it democratises education, allowing anyone to get the foundational education they need for the workforce.

Universities have since come on board to include microcredentials from learning platforms as part of their curriculum. For example, law students can learn about artificial intelligence (AI) and the law and smart contracts as an extension of their classroom lessons.

This means that universities don’t have to hire many lecturers to teach niche modules, but can reap the same educational benefits through their collaboration with online learning platforms. This also allows students to garner qualifications from top universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge.

However, the real challenge now is for people to prove to companies that they are able to apply the microcredential to the job they are working at or applying for. It’s a norm among employers to get potential candidates to do an assessment to prove their capabilities during the interview process. On top of that, the impact of microcredentials on a person’s position or pay at work is hardly materialised.

Will universities be rendered obsolete? Highly unlikely but with the hybrid learning model gaining momentum in becoming the new norm for tertiary education, we will most likely see more collaborations between universities and online learning platforms.

Read more in DigitalEdge in the March 14 edition of The Edge Malaysia weekly.

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