Dive Brief:
- The growing number of online classes and tutorials has happened for a reason, mainly because employers need talent with today's technical and digital skills.
- Yet, having those skills may not mean as much as job seekers might think, according to the Wall Street Journal. Recruiters told the Journal that HR or line of business managers currently have little confidence in the entities who offer those online credentials.
- In response, academic researchers are collaborating with trade groups to create such standards, according to the Journal. That would include an online registry where both employers and job seekers can check credentials to try and determine exactly which skills are actually gained.
Dive Insight:
“This market is basically chaos,” Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, told Journal reporter Lauren Weber. “With these credentials, there’s no one body setting a standard.”
By mid 2016, there will be a pilot version of the directory, Weber writes, with about 100 educational institutions publishing their credential information.
“We want employers to be able to lay out the skill requirements of a job, and then find credentials that best match their criteria,” Robert Sheets, a workforce expert at George Washington University, told Weber. GW is creating the registry working with Southern Illinois University and the American National Standards Institute, according to the Journal.
