Growth & Jobs | Employ credential innovation - Thorpe
Published:Tuesday | January 29, 2019 | 12:00 AM
Sean Thorpe, president of the Jamaica Computer Society, has said that in order for Jamaican graduates to survive globally, they must employ what he describes as the credential innovation.
Thorpe indicated that this has been the trend globally, where one simply assembles or stacks a series of traditional degree-based and non-traditional credentials that recognise achievements and provide an accurate assessment of knowledge, skills, and abilities over time.
“How we prepare graduates for the workplace has been seeing major disruptions globally. This is observed by the notable phenomenon of credential innovation. Credential innovation is a hot topic in higher education, from micro credentials to digital badges, from competency-based and clickable transcripts to stackable credentials,” he said.
“More local and regional businesses have started to ask for this option as dated qualifications and knowledge could render the graduate a ‘disposable asset’ to the workforce because of the sheer lack of relevance to the subject matter and competence required in delivery of skills for specific tasks,” Thorpe said.
New trends
He noted that huge companies are moving away from the traditional four-degree placement to focus more on knowledge and competency.
“In recent times, the larger companies like Google have moved away from the traditional four-year degree placements for hire and have started to ask for the stack credentials options to advise the knowledge and competency-based relevant skills for placement. This trend, I believe, will be very evident from 2019 onwards and serves as a local wake-up call the traditional academia,” he said.
The president noted, too, that the more credentials learners accumulate and stack, the more they increase their currency in the knowledge economy, creating alternative pathways to better jobs and higher wages.
“One strongly believes that as the local workforce of business process outsourcing, especially for the high-order jobs of relevant analytic skills defined by the knowledge process outsourcing markets pick up increased traction, we will start to see a growing trend of stacked credentials used to recruit and retain skilled professionals,” Thorpe told The Gleaner.
“With this type of narrative, one captures a number of salient ideas, which underlines important observations in what credentials are being stacked and why,” he continued.
He added: “The four-year degree has increasingly become the primary focus of higher education as evidenced by the shift of many two-year institutions towards transfer-friendly programmes for learners whose final aspirations are a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, the longer history of community colleges, as well as many land-grant and technical four-year institutions, has been to provide educational programmes and credentials tied to occupational fields at the certificate level, tied to certification, or at the associate level, with a tight vocational focus.”