A New Series: Understanding Microcredentials — From Wherever You Sit

If you've bumped into the word "microcredential" on campus this year, in a course, an advising conversation, a hallway conversation, a Shriver Center flyer, you've probably noticed it means something a little different depending on who's saying it.

A student thinks about it as something to put on a resume. A faculty member thinks about it as an extension of the learning outcomes they already write. An advisor wonders if it's one more thing to track. An employer wonders if it's actually worth anything. And folks working in policy see it as part of a much bigger national conversation about how skills are recognized outside a transcript.

All of those framings are correct. But none of them are complete on their own.

So instead of writing one generic explainer and hoping it landed for everyone, the Digital Credential Innovation (DCI) team built five audience-specific briefs — each one answering the questions that particular audience actually asks, in the language they actually use.

Starting next week, we'll be featuring one brief a week here on myUMBC:

• Faculty — Your Teaching Already Does This. Let's Make It Count.

• Students — Your Skills, Verified.

• Academic Advisors — Microcredentials and Your Advising Conversations

• Employers — What Your Next Great Hire Can Actually Prove

• Government Relations & Policy Audiences — Digital Credentials and Maryland's Workforce Future

Why now? UMBC was selected for the inaugural cohort of the national LER (Learning and Employment Records) Accelerator, one of only 25 institutions nationwide, and Maryland had more institutions represented than any other state. Congress held a bipartisan hearing on LERs this past December, and federal legislation introduced this spring aims to build state-level infrastructure for verified credentials. In other words, the work UMBC has been building since 2015 is increasingly relevant to a much bigger conversation, and it felt like the right moment to ensure every part of our community understands where they fit into it.

Each post in this series will pull out something worth knowing from that audience's brief, not just a summary, but the parts we think are genuinely interesting or useful, with a link to the full brief if you want to go deeper.

First up next week: faculty, and the case that you're probably already doing the work microcredentials recognize; you just haven't had a way to document it yet.

Questions in the meantime? Submit a support ticket or reach out to the DCI team directly.