Explore how learning businesses can create broader impact by aligning educational paths, credentials, and employer needs. Dive into the rising importance of reskilling and upskilling in today's workforce and discover how learning organizations can adapt to market demands. Uncover the evolving role of these businesses in adult education and prepare for 2024 by focusing on innovative credentialing and relevant curricula. Transform your understanding of current capabilities and industry partnerships to deliver high-value learning experiences.
Aligning educational offerings with specific career paths significantly enhances relevant outcomes for both learners and employers.
Diversifying credentialing strategies, such as micro-credentials, is essential to meet evolving market demands and improve employability.
Deep dives
The Importance of Aligning with Employment Market Needs
Successful learning businesses increasingly center their strategies around the needs of the employment market to deliver relevant educational outcomes. By aligning offerings with specific career or job paths, organizations can ensure that their educational products serve both learners and employers effectively. For example, 83.5% of surveyed learning businesses reported actively aligning their programs with career trajectories, highlighting a significant trend toward targeted education. This alignment is crucial for creating value and ensuring that learners gain competences that are directly applicable in their workplaces.
The Shift Towards Alternative Credentialing
There is a notable shift towards new and alternative approaches to credentialing in contemporary education, with 73.4% of learning businesses exploring options like micro-credentials and digital badges. These credentials are becoming essential as they offer learners validated and recognized proof of their skills, enhancing their employability. This trend reflects the evolving expectations of both learners and employers, who are seeking more recognized and relevant certification methods. By diversifying credentialing strategies, learning businesses can meet the changing demands of the market and improve learner outcomes.
The Role of Partnerships in Education
Building partnerships is vital for learning businesses as they work to meet the growing educational demands of the workforce. Collaborating with employers, academic institutions, and other organizations can create synergies that enhance the relevance and effectiveness of educational offerings. Many sophisticated employers are pivoting towards long-term professional development roles for their employees, allowing learning businesses to align educational programs with these professional development needs. In such a landscape, leveraging partnerships not only expands resource capabilities but also ensures that educational services remain impactful and innovative.
Impact is one of the core goals at the heart of most learning businesses, and we believe that impact should be as broad as possible—meaning ideally your learning business delivers significant and relevant results for learners, for the organizations that employ those learners, and for the fields, professions, and industries those learners work in.
In this episode, number 430, Leading Learning Podcast co-hosts Jeff Cobb and Celisa Steele look at how providing learning paths, offering valued credentials, and aligning with employer needs are three activities that can deliver impact on their own and how the combination of all three is more potent—and a bullseye learning businesses might want to aim for.