Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Teri: Purpose at work is down to about 17% among especially Western culture. Employees and adults are really driven to invest in upskilling and reskilling needs once they believe that the learning is important. So how do we define some of those things with those underlying theories of adult motivation to make something important and to also tie a connection that helps employees as we know from Gallup polls for decades now.
[00:00:33] Jeff: Welcome to the EdTechConnect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your Jeff, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
I have a Teri today that really encourages everyone to talk about the opportunities and considerations that technology introduces to the human experience.
Teri Abo Sutherland is a technology professional with over 20 years of experience leading an end to end IT procurement and business operations and currently serves as the Director of Executive Education at the School of Business Administration at Oakland University. She presents on a variety of technology topics that are shaping our modern day renaissance. Teri holds a Bachelor of Science in elementary Education from Eastern Michigan and a Master's in Public Administration from Oakland University and and just earned her doctorate in Organizational Leadership this month from Oakland University, rounding out a 30 year commitment to personal and professional development.
So welcome to the show. Terr.
[00:02:10] Teri: Thank you Josh.
[00:02:11] Jeff: Thanks for having me today and congrats on the doctorate. I know how much effort that takes, so that's great.
[00:02:16] Teri: Thank you.
[00:02:17] Jeff: Can you start off and just tell us you have an interesting background and what led you to this world of micro credentials and digital badges?
[00:02:27] Teri: Yeah, so I think a lot of it was my career in technology and what I discovered in technology was that those professionals, the technical engineers especially, they don't get the luxury of time to pursue upskilling and reskilling. It's really the difference between having a very successful and lucrative career and watching your skills become technically obsolescent very quickly if you don't make those investments. We know in education that even though that's our industry and that's what we promote oftentimes within our corporate business partners, training and professional development is one of the first line items that gets cut on the budget. So, as a former corporate employee as well, trying to find the tie between understanding the value of keeping Highly skilled professionals in the organization with both specialized skills in their specific industry, but also upskilling and reskilling is really important to make sure that we can be sustainable and prosperous into the future. So I just got interested in learning how do we promote and communicate that message better that we're here as education professionals and have this kind of a shelf material to help.
[00:03:40] Jeff: That's interesting. Let's start with the basics. Can you explain what micro credentials and digital badges are and how they differ from traditional degrees or certifications?
[00:03:53] Teri: So there's two primary types of badges or credentials. One is a proficiency credential which it's really focused more on. You know, if you want to go into leadership and you're doing some leadership development or if you want to get specialized in data analytics, specific software or program. We see this a lot in technology with the Cisco certification path where it's highly specialized. So those proficiency non credit bearing credentials are one type of micro credential to prove out the learning competency and the other are four credit academic bearing credentials which can lead to stackable to additional college degrees. And so those are tied more to some of the requirements for accreditation needs to make sure that we are vetting those at the same that we would as a degree bearing program.
[00:04:46] Jeff: Right. I've seen it seems like the whole world is becoming more, I would say smaller content chunks, we have smaller attention spans and I almost look at a four year degree as like especially in the technology sector. After a year or two you have some great experience and a lot of students can't wait the four years before they need to start making a living. So I can see how it really fits what types of industries or even employers are really recognizing these credentials.
[00:05:17] Teri: Well, I'll share with you. I think that there has been a refocus on the importance of these especially after August 2022 from the kind of the great resignation period where everyone was scrambling quite quickly to rehire to get people in positions through that. What we lost actually was tenure in the organization's average tenure in American companies right now is about 4.1 years. And that's really fascinating to me because I think that we have a commitment among those of us who are seasoned to normalize again the benefits of having people in your environment with experience.
So we're seeing requests come from our corporate partners for our executive ed programs for some basic things. Leadership development, project management, change management is a heavy request right now. So many people spend their academic career getting a very specialized professional degree and those curriculum don't allow for some of those other duties and responsibilities that you get once you get into an organization.
In technology, what I found became very important for me was taking professional development in project management. We all become project managers now and sometimes program managers. And there is a fundamental difference when you've had some formal training to learn why that's important, to understand the benefits of planning how to execute through a project and then especially how to stay on kind of for the long haul after the immediate need is completed. Or we define what done looks like. In technology especially, we have a life cycle that lasts sometimes in perpetuity. Hopefully that's not the plan, but we really have a long term engagement to make sure that we maintain those investments that we bring into the university setting or in the corporate setting. And we have folks who honor and understand the importance of that life cycle management.
[00:07:16] Jeff: So you're developing a toolkit to help employers understand the value of micro credentials and digital badges. What are some of the key benefits that employers can realize by incorporating these tools into their talent management strategies?
[00:07:32] Teri: So I really got interested in this because passion and purpose at work is down to about 17% among especially Western culture employees and adults are really driven to invest in upskilling and reskilling needs once they believe that the learning is important. So how do we define some of those things with those underlying theories of adult motivation to make something important and to also tie a connection that helps employees. As we know from Gallup poll for decades now, understanding how you contribute meaningfully to the bottom line is the important measure for employees. So especially with all of this change in the organization, managing four generations at one time in the workforce, it's very important to understand, you know, how we might approach this. So I think that there's some work on behalf of the employee and there's some work on behalf of the employer and how we could tie that together to recapture meaningfulness.
So the toolkit is really first, I designed a survey that will go out to employees to really explore with them why they might approach professional development. What's their motivation for it? Is it just to learn a topic they're interested in, or do they really have some formal career aspirations that they would like to achieve these credentials so that they could have the opportunity to interview for those positions when they come up? So once they have the survey done and they have a time to reflect, I'm asking employers in parallel at the same time to really revisit their 4's grid box on their employees to try to define and look again with all of the movement they've had, have they taken a real inventory to see where there's some opportunity with some of their rising stars or some people who just need a little bit of encouragement that they see them in that light. With that, I would ask employers then to take their strategic plans and really revisit those to look at the skills assessment. So with the current defined plans, especially with disruptive transformation, you can easily take a software solution or an enterprise solution and just start with that for your strategic plan and say, do we have the right skills in the organization? And if you don't know, that's a great time to then work with your HR department to kind of pull some of those skills through, maybe a text mining activity to garner those out of the resumes. And then what you have is you have an opportunity to sit with employees and say I've looked at the survey with you. This is how we've identified you as some opportunities within our organization based on what we see that you do outside of our investment with you. We did this skills assessment and hey Jeff, we really need someone who is fluent in power bi. So if you are willing to do the certification program, we'll pay for that. And then upon completion, we have job duties and responsibilities that we want to rewrite your job description and then of course have an incentive to it. So for me that's kind of a holistic approach to find ways to tie excitement back into some opportunity to do these things. And then for the company they're recognizing that is a direct kind of return on investment to fulfill a skills need in the organization.
[00:10:50] Jeff: So what are some of the common misperceptions or hesitations that employers might have about micro credentials and how do you address those?
[00:11:01] Teri: I think right now it's creating the value proposition around them. I think that's where we have a real opportunity for education. On what is the meaning of a credential? What is the meaning of a credential for a proficiency kind of non credit versus an academic bearing that gives an opportunity to specialize for professional development that leads to a specialized skill in the industry. And once we can work together, and that's where I think that the toolkit will really be helpful and meaningful. We'll have an opportunity collectively to start to look at where we have some opportunity to define skills that we need in the organization to make sure that we are on par with really the sustainability idea based on the pace of disruption. Right now there's a lot of disruption happening at the same time and I want to make sure that we Have a way to kind of keep that fluid so that we're moving at the same pace as the disruption.
[00:11:59] Jeff: So looking at accredited institutions versus maybe private competition and all these new options students have, who do you see adopting this micro credentialing faster or is higher ed been resistant to this and maybe all the competition is kind of pushing them this way or how do you. How are you seeing that?
[00:12:19] Teri: So I just completed a data study on this and it was really interesting to find out. In education we are, you know, quickly adopting solutions to issue micro credentials and digital badges. But what I think we need to do first is teach what that means about a credential coming from one university versus the other. We should talk about our approval processes and what that means, the rigor behind those to especially for academic credit bearing. What does that mean?
I think the difficulty right now is a lot of investments being made in badging solutions can push out badges that are specific to an organization or an industry. But many of those solutions don't yet know how to ingest external badges. So there's not a value proposition just yet to understand what does it mean beyond a marketing tool in corporate. And I think education has a place now to really be the educators on why would you find value in that credential and what does it do to help support specialized skills? And what does the stackable to degree really do to help encourage an adult learner while they're working for your organization to give as much time in their specialized field to continue to develop in other ways? So as we talked earlier, leadership development, maybe some project or program management or a very specialized skill in a very specialized software discipline that's needed?
[00:13:52] Jeff: I'm thinking there's probably a lot of micro credentials that go really well together.
Are you seeing like stacks of credentials being bundled in a way where maybe an employer might say like, yeah, we really want you to get this kind of marketing stack of credentials or business or is that happening too?
[00:14:13] Teri: I would say that I think we have some nationally recognized credentials and credentialing pathways that are definitely seen in that way. So I would say things like itil, itsm, Agile Project management, some of the specialties for network engineers. We've definitely seen that. I do think we have some work together to define outside of that. How do we bundle skills together, specialized skills together to make those more meaningful instead of just kind of one at a time parsing that there has to be some pathway because it's really hard to show a return on investment in that. So we want to be able to show really that investment benefit of if you have that whole employee who shows up to work and can really support in different facets of the needs that you have within the organization, those become the value of those other specialized skills.
[00:15:10] Jeff: Right. So if you look at higher ed, the way we share our degree or our, you know, what we've accomplished, it's kind of antiquated. You know, you have to go get a transcript request and send that to your new potential employer. How do you track your digital badges? How do people store those and provide those to potential employers?
[00:15:31] Teri: I think the most common way right now is really depending on the badge issuers. And I see most people are sharing those publicly. Is that public recognition on their LinkedIn profile? Let's say. So it's becoming almost a public resume for everyone to see. I also think that we have a little bit of work to do there. I mean, we looked at ISET for many years, you know, for decades they have captured this on the CEUs. And I'll say that in my career, even changing between my brief stint in corporate and back to higher education, it has been very rare for anyone to ask me about my professional development CEUs. I don't know, based on the changes in the solutions that have been purchased over the years, I don't think there's a single repository. And I would tell you honestly that probably over the last few decades I've lost track of some of those that I have earned unless they have with them a maintenance cycle where I need to be recertified or retest out on those. So definitely I think we have some work to look at. And how do we want to create this new framework that's really going to support in perpetuity what the meaning behind the credential is, how we display and receive badges. And if we're going to invest in a solution, is it really organization specific or are we interested in understanding all of the credentials that someone has earned to make sure we're investing in solutions that can ingest external badges as well?
[00:17:02] Jeff: Yeah, I was thinking I have a couple of these too, and I wouldn't know how to, you know, I put them on my LinkedIn and I wouldn't know how to go back and check with my certifying organization if I have to renew anything or like that.
From the learner's perspective, what are the advantages you see in pursuing micro credentials and badges and how does it empower their careers or allow them to explore new fields?
[00:17:28] Teri: I think the most important thing right now is just understanding with the Disruptive transformation we're in. I keep coining this as the modern day Renaissance period. And I think we're in a really exciting time to be at work. We are going to be part of the history books. I keep telling my friends, I'm not quite sure if I'm going to live until the next Enlightenment period while we kind of reassess and reevaluate all of these things. But I think being able to get very comfortable being uncomfortable at work professionally is going to be one of the most important skills going into the future. The technology is not the disruption at this point in time. It's the pace at which the technology disruptions are happening. This is what we haven't seen before. So, you know, in 1890 we had the addition of the adding machine, but we're yet to get rid of CPAs because that's still the specialized skill with the adding machine came in efficiency with the job. We saw this again with, you know, telephone operators and bank tellers once ATMs came around. But we definitely saw those things happening in cycles of around two decades. We definitely are seeing disruption at a pace that none of us are comfortable with anymore. And so I think it's going to be really important to understand that the more you can keep yourself learning and growing and upskilling and maybe getting uncomfortable and learning some areas that you hadn't quite known before.
I can share in my career, I pursued learning obligations where at the time I didn't really know why I was involved in those or wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it. And then within a short amount of time, maybe three to five years, that skill really came in handy for where we had evolved in business or in education. So I would just promote, get very comfortable being uncomfortable and continue to upskill and reskill with any opportunity anyone will give you.
[00:19:24] Jeff: That's the new world, right? The extreme pace of evolution in so many ways.
What are some key takeaways you would give our listeners to remember about the importance of micro credentials and badges?
[00:19:39] Teri: I would say I think it's a great conversation to have if the only opportunity you have, if you're not a leader in the organization yet, an opportunity during performance reviews to just ask the question and say, have you really looked at a skills assessment for the organization? Is there somewhere that you have a need or somewhere that you have recognized that you think I would be able to grow quickly to help support the needs in the organization? I think understanding why you pursue professional development, upskilling and reskilling for yourself is a really great conversation to maybe inspire others to think about that as well. Why do you approach that opportunity from an adult motivation perspective? Because once we can change the way we talk about ourselves and about why we do it, we can usually change the way that we talk about those ideas in general.
From an employer perspective. I think taking inventory of your current employees, especially again after you've had so much turnover or you're seeing continued turnover again, really doing some effort to look at what's available in house and start evaluating, is that a skill that you can upskill and reskill, or is that really an opportunity for a third party to come support you as you grow that skill in the organization and tying that to your strategic plans? I know for some of our innovative companies, they're really looking at strategic plans and quarterly views right now. So that is an activity that is going to need some time and attention dedicated to it to make sure that we can meet those demands for disruption.
[00:21:19] Jeff: You wrote a really insightful article in Educause called Creating a Culture of Innovation. And so it prompted me to ask you, in your experience, how crucial is leadership buy in when you're fostering a culture of innovation and what strategies can be employed to secure to secure it?
[00:21:37] Teri: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to kind of, if you've been a leader for a while, I think it's important to take a look at your leadership philosophy and maybe see if you need to make some adjustments. We are expecting people to explore, experiment and tinker, which brings with it risk. And if our tenure is down to about 4.1 years, those typically aren't our employees that are willing to go out on a limb and do those things. There's also some things culturally that we have to really focus in on. One is communication. So how do we talk about disruptive change? We should be encouraging conversations that really start off with, well, how might we do that in exploring all possibilities before we start layering on all of the inhibitors, like talking about all the financial sacrifices in order to let that idea lend itself another meeting. So I encourage really an opportunity to just exhaust all possibilities in an idea and really, as the leader in the organization, changing the way that you approach those conversations. Think about how do you talk about things that don't work or aren't successful, Especially if you want people to continue working through disruption with you to lead to incremental improvement. That might be the ultimate discovery. I would also say it's really important to think about from a leadership perspective in this space to encourage others to want to take the journey. How do we change the way that we look at accountability matrix? So if you're partnering me, especially with an AI partner and the AI fails and that cannot be insubordinated, what is the risk to turn to me then and say, well, it's a failure, so it's on you because I can do something with your failure over the AI. With that, I think there's a responsibility to look at fault tolerance metrics in the organization. These two pieces are really important to approach performance reviews for your employees. And then with that I think you have to step back and also then look at your decision governance framework and how is that supportive of an innovative culture that you want to thrive?
[00:23:42] Jeff: Yeah, that's a great answer too. For how to balance the inherent risks of innovation with the need for stability and reliability.
Well, I want to thank you for being on the show, Teri, and we will leave links to Teri's LinkedIn and any other resources for micro credentialing in the show notes. It was great to have you on.
[00:24:05] Teri: Great. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for the opportunity.
[00:24:10] Jeff: As we wrap up this episode, remember EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
