Guest Commentator: Mary Ellen Caro, President & CEO, Peirce College @PeirceCollege
How can professional certifications be leveraged to help individuals better prepare to join the workforce?
COVID-19 has turned higher education on its head and forced colleges and universities to rethink how they can play a meaningful role in our region’s recharge and recovery effort.
The pandemic caused millions of Americans to change their education plans and continues to have the greatest effect on those in low-skill, low-wage occupations who lost their jobs. We need to find better ways to prepare students for existing and emerging job opportunities that do not require them to complete an entire degree before they qualify for a job that pays a family-sustaining wage.
At Peirce College, we have created shorter, stackable educational opportunities that leverage industry-recognized credentials to help students validate that they possess the skills needed by employers.
We are collaborating with partners to offer noncredit training courses that prepare students to earn certifications in a range of fields, including project management, cybersecurity, and information technology. Peirce currently awards credit for 14 of these certifications.
This gives students the option of taking a training course and certification exam in place of a Peirce course. In most cases, it is more affordable to complete the training course and take the certification exam. When a student passes the certification exam, they gain both the credential and earn college credit that applies directly to a degree.
This provides our students with an affordable, tangible benefit early in their educational journey – a valuable credential recognized by employers, as well as credit that applies to a degree program or certificate.
According to a recent survey from Strada Education Network, value and career relevance are top factors for students considering an educational program during the pandemic.
In addition, the Business Roundtable recently launched a new effort to emphasize the value of skills to help improve equity, diversity, and workplace culture.
Through our new Center for Workforce Innovation and Partnerships, we are also working closely with employers to align their training and development needs with our academic portfolio – and reimagining the internship model to provide a more diverse pipeline of talent and creating shorter, stackable programs.
Giving students the option of embedding a professional certification into their degree program helps position them more effectively for the labor market, increases the value of their degree, and helps employers hire job-ready graduates for key positions. Perhaps most importantly for adults and other nontraditional learners, it positions students to find sustainable employment while they are finishing a college degree.
This approach also is the subject of a new report released by Workcred, a nonprofit credentialing organization that co-authored the report with three higher education associations.
Today, our students face more and more challenges. We need to respond with a new approach that includes credentials that validate skills for emerging job opportunities and a flexible platform that supports degree completion and lifelong learning.
We need to recognize the individual mosaics of learning and expertise that adults and other nontraditional students bring to our institutions and be more proactive in leveraging prior learning. This will create unique pathways that accelerate the benefit of degree completion and take students where they need to go.
Through Recharge & Recover PHL, the Chamber is working with our members to position Greater Philadelphia as the new national model to learn, apprentice, and work in the jobs of the future.
This objective is part of five aspirations of Recharge & Recover PHL with the aim to support not only Greater Philadelphia’s recovery but to also provide a means to differentiate our region for decades to come.
