Host: Welcome to CET Talks, the International Accreditors for Continue Education and Trainings podcast where we convene thought leaders in the continue education and training ecosystem to share ideas, research best practices, and experiences that promote the creation of a world that learns better. Enjoy the episode.

Randy Bowman: Hello and welcome to CET Talks. My name is Randy Bowman, IACET president and CEO, and I’m here with my co-host, Mike Veny, a certified corporate wellness specialist and CEO of an IACET-accredited provider.

Mike Veny: And I am the CET Co-host today, Mike Veny. Hi, Randy. How are you?

Randy Bowman: Doing well. Good to see you.

Mike Veny: Good to see you, too. I just want to let you know that as a provider, sometimes I get overwhelmed with the credentialing thing. It’s like this constantly changing world of micro-credentials, digital badging, and all this stuff, and even after all these interviews we do on the show, I’m still trying to make sense of it.

Randy Bowman: Oh, I’m right there with you, Mike. I’ve been studying this myself recently and there are so many different ways to award and recognize learning to learners. It’s almost too much. And what makes one credential better than another or does that credential even mean anything? It’s the sum of them. So I’m glad to see other people are confused and it’s not just me.

Mike Veny: Well, maybe we might get some answers today. We have a very special guest, Dr. Chris Mullin, who’s the strategy director of data and measurement for the Lumina Foundation. And the Lumina Foundation is an independent private foundation based in Indianapolis, Indiana, committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. I love that. He’s previously supported a variety of organizations and institutions, including the Education Commission of the States, the Florida College System, the State University System of Florida, the American Association of Community Colleges and more. Chris, welcome to our show.

Dr. Chris Mullin: Thank you so much Mike and Randy. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today and share what I’ve learned and learn from you in the process.

Randy Bowman: Well, Chris, I have to be honest, I was a big fan of a recent article that you published called “Making Sense of Credential Chaos.” It was in the Higher Education Digest, and I just loved that term ‘credential chaos’. Can you elaborate for our listeners on what this chaos looks like in practice and its impact on learners and employers?

Dr. Chris Mullin: Sure, Randy. Just briefly, it’s a mess, right? It’s such a mess that I was asked by the US Department of Education to write a paper to help them think about how to actually capture this information because they care deeply about understanding and honoring the learning journeys of all Americans. What started as a journey to understand for me, why do they even count certificates, led to this larger investigation about different federal agencies collecting data on the same credential but using a different name. Imagine, you earn a certification in pipe fitting and the Department of Labor calls it an industry certification, the Census Bureau calls it a professional certification, and the Department of Education calls it an educational certificate. It’s a mess, right? Everybody claims their own name for something. Then we have private organizations trying very hard to bring clarity, but it seems they’re also adding new names in nano degrees or credentials that don’t show up anywhere. So, we have this situation where not only do individuals not fully understand what they’re receiving, the government doesn’t fully have a clear framework to understand what’s happening. Then you bring it to an employer, and they don’t really know. It’s really important because we know that short-term credentials matter in people’s lives. Everybody understands what the degree is. I think by us innovating with names and feeling everybody’s adding their own name to something, it’s actually hurting the movement to honor and validate learning that happens through continuing education and training in our country. So, this confusion that’s costing us time, it’s costing us money, it’s hindering people’s ability to actually progress and grow in their jobs and provide the life that they want. At the same time, they have all these skills and talents and learning that they’ve acquired. So, it’s a mess and we’re just setting forth to try and understand it, document it as a first step to move forward.

Mike Veny: Do you think it would help if there were some kind of universal standard around credentialing?

Dr. Chris Mullin: I do think it would matter, and that was part of this long paper I wrote, which is available online and where the shorter article came from. I thought this just created a typology of three things, right? And OECD, UNESCO—this is a worldwide problem. This is not like an American problem. Let’s just state that. I said, can we organize everything into three categories. First is micro-credentials, and those are anything that take less than 12 credit hours to complete, less than a semester. It can be 10 hours contact hours of time, it could be 12 credit hours. Something in that area is where this bucket is, I put around what I call micro-credentials. Things longer than that, which tend to be degrees, we just call macro credentials. They take longer than that, and that’s wonderful. That actually came from a paper out of Europe, this term macro credentials. I mean, great, if we have micro, we should probably have macro too, right? I mean, let’s put everything on the table and put them into the right buckets. Then the third bucket, which confuses individuals a little bit, are what I call maintenance credentials, which are those that are time limited, and you need additional learning to be renewed. Things like teaching licenses or other licenses; law degrees, people who are lawyers, doctors, others. Generally when you’re in a care of another individual, you have to maintain your license or certification. And so I call those maintenance credentials. Things that are time limited, last for a little while, but you need to prove that you’re keeping up on knowledge to maintain those. Those are the three buckets: micro, macro, and maintenance. That’s the contribution I tried to make.

Mike Veny: You just calmed so much of the chaos in my mind with that explanation. So thank you. And I hope those of you listening heard that really clearly. I think it puts it into perspective how we need to organize it. You said this was worldwide, but let’s go to the United States. In your research, you discussed the decline of short-term credentials across several states. What do you believe is the root cause of this decline, and how can organizations and employers address this challenge?

Dr. Chris Mullin: Sure. Well, thanks for looking at the research and citing it. Yeah, the research really you’re referencing is called Stronger Nation. It is the report card that Lumina Foundation puts out every year that really tracks educational attainment in the country. We’ve spent a lot of time working with states, institutions, and other leaders to help ensure that the country has the workforce it needs, right? This was not a goal the Foundation made up. It was based upon the needs of the workforce in the future set all the way back in 2009, and we’ve been working for years on this and this research is our annual report on that information. We’ve made a lot of growth from 38% in 2009 to 54% in 2022. So the country’s doing amazing work on graduating more students.

Let’s just make that abundantly clear for people who question the value of higher ed. More people are enrolling, they’re earning credentials, and we have a stronger workforce and stronger country because of it. A part of that is us working really hard to honor and validate the learning that’s happening in the short-term credential space. We use data from the American Community Survey, and right now that’s just like the ‘some college’ box. Did you get a high school diploma, some college, or a degree? And so where we spend a lot of time and energy and effort is really trying to unpack this some college bucket and account certificates and certifications that fall in there is somebody’s first credential. And what we’re seeing in some states is it’s decreasing a little bit. It’s been a couple years. It’s not decreasing dramatically, but 10th of a percentage, 0.2 tenths of a percentage point, which are still a lot of people. And so that’s something we’re really keeping an eye on.  

The good news is that degree completion is going up. So some of those individuals might be getting a degree. They might be stacking them and using them or embedding them in degree programs, which is wonderful. But that’s also a question of maybe some individuals are earning some certifications and certificates that may have personal value, but they don’t have any real economic value. That’s the tricky part of this conversation. I have a certification from LinkedIn on Executive Presence on Zoom Calls, something I could use today. That was valuable to me when I was leading an initiative. I took a 10-minute thing, I learned things like, “Hey, have a bookshelf behind you. Have a plant to dress up. Make sure you present yourself as an executive.” Wonderful. I have a doctorate. I mean, that was helpful information, but it’s not going to get me the job. Those things are personally valuable, and I don’t discredit them, I get them myself. What we’re really talking about are ones that get people jobs that have meaning and value. So that’s what we’d really try and measure. That’s why they’re going down a little bit and states are doing a really good job of doing things like creating master credential lists or other things by connecting credentials to earnings outcomes to really understand which short-term credentials are of value in their communities and in their states.

Randy Bowman: You just mentioned, Chris, that the power of a credential to a learner to better their employment options. Can you talk about some ways that we can ensure that credentialing systems remain accessible and beneficial, particularly focused on some underserved populations?

Dr. Chris Mullin: Yeah, it’s critically important for underserved populations because we’re working really hard—the collective ‘we’. I’m talking states; I just talked with people in Iowa doing amazing work in this space, right? Researchers at the University of Michigan studying student data, trying to understand how these work together. What we’re really trying to do is think about how we take and help individuals who aspire for more, who maybe have a high school diploma, and think about what’s the credential that will actually help you move forward economically, to be able to have more time to spend with your family, the volunteering communities, to do the things that they can’t currently do because they’re working hourly and having a hard time making ends of meet. And so there’s all types of efforts underway to really understand what those particular credentials are. And again, it’s hard at a national level, we really listen to and rely on our states because every local economy’s so very different.

It’s really fascinating. You might have an automobile plan, and all the automobile certifications are really important in places like Alabama. In other parts of the country something else might be really important. So, we don’t articulate it, but we encourage and engage in conversations and learn from states and communities about what’s important for them. I think that’s the really important part. This requires matching your earnings data with your certification data to really know which you want as accreditation. That means that some of them might or might not meet the bar, and these are difficult conversations. They’re important conversations, because without some kind of bar of quality around them, however constructed, we run the fear, and I think what we’re seeing is a lot of credentialing of things that are just things you do on a daily basis.

Randy Bowman: So you mentioned needing to compare data from the Department of Labor with maybe data from the Education Department or the education system. I have some experience with that in a previous job, and what I found so often is that these different departments are real. They like to own their data, and sharing just doesn’t seem to be part of the culture in state regulatory systems. How can we overcome that? How can we introduce this idea that we’re better together than we are apart?

Dr. Chris Mullin: Yeah, absolutely. The interesting part, we do a lot of work on that and just talking with my friends at the data quality campaign, which kind of tracks this issue nationally for us and for the country really, is idea of privacy protections because they exist in two data sources. The Department of Labor has your earnings data, maybe the Department of Professional Regulations has your certification data, and maybe the Department of Education has your certificate data. How do we get the three of these to work together? What’s really exciting is we’re popping up is these offices in Florida, there’s something called the Reach office that actually pulls all these state agencies together, says prioritizes working together and sharing data so we can know. Now, the hard part having worked in system offices is sharing individual level data back with colleges and providers. It can be very hard given the memorandums of understanding and the legal complexities around sharing data of certain cell sizes without getting too wonky, right?

Randy Bowman: You get wonky here.

Dr. Chris Mullin: Yeah, we get wonky, I know, but at least we can share it back in aggregate or say, hey, 20% of the people who graduated in this program are doing X or Y. We see that in the Department of Labor through their post participant individual record layouts and their reports on the education training providers is working on doing this. We see the Department of Education through the college scorecard is trying to give earnings data back. Their census bureau has something called the post-secondary employment outcomes opportunity for states to match data. There’s some other work going on with the IRS to share data back, but there’s protections. It’s the protections and violating confidentiality I think is the real problem, Randy, with getting the data. But every day I wake up, I mean, I was just organizing a meeting this morning of people to talk about this and how do we get data back to in the best way possible. So it’s an all day, everyday effort to reach that ideal place where we can stand and share data and have really clear understanding.

Randy Bowman: Thank you for your insight.

Mike Veny: So to review, we’ve got macro credentials, micro credentials, and maintenance credentials. I’m just saying that for the listeners out there. This is a great way to categorize it. In your article, you mentioned experiences with earning various types of micro credentials. From your perspective, what are the pros and cons of these new forms of credentialing, and how do they fit into the broader learning ecosystem?

Dr. Chris Mullin: Yeah, I think that’s a great question, Mike. And I think personally, I think they’re all pros, right? We’re in an age of documentation. You can’t walk three steps without somebody taking their picture and posting on a social media platform. That is the era. I think when historians look back a hundred years from now, they’ll be like, this was the age of documenting. It wasn’t the greatest generation, it was the age of documentation. We love to document ourselves, and that’s not a bad thing. That’s extended to all areas of life when we learn. I used to be a K12 teacher, so I’d have to do professional development to keep my teaching license, and I would get a little piece of paper saying, you learned how to use markers to highlight passages to help people understand the paragraph, highlight the noun, highlight the verb, and I would get a unit credit for that.

Now it’s posted on your LinkedIn account or another asset account, and it’s a digital badge and you have this. We’re documenting things differently. That’s a value because we know more about what we know. The con is I think sometimes individuals might get a little too excited at those documentations of learning are. Really what matters to individuals is growing economically and actually leading to a better life. My fear is that individuals are earning credentials that keep them in the same place, and they don’t really see any growth or upper mobility, if that’s their intention. Again, this is part of this intentionality. If you want to think about executive presence on Zoom calls, that’s a different thing. But if you’re going in to earn a credential, a short-term credential to give you a pay boost to say, I can now fix brakes on a car, so I’m ASC certified in this one little area, or I can now work on an HVAC system and that doesn’t pay off or it doesn’t work, then there’s some challenges, and then people start to devalue the education and learning.

The cons is with too many of them might be the case that people are being told that they’ll have outcomes that they won’t really achieve. What we really need are the private credentialing bodies in the country to start sharing their data, to start matching it to earnings. There are places, if they’re interested, they can call me. We’ve helped some national providers set up ways and avenues to do that. The piping is built, the framing is built. We just need people to move in. But if you’re a private credentialing body and you’re suggesting that your credential leads to economic improvement for an individual, let’s prove it. We’ve got access to the information. We need to do that more and more. It can’t just be the public entities that are responsible for it because a lot of this innovation and work is happening in the private space.

Randy Bowman: I saw that in your article and in your paper as well about getting iPads and NCES to actually become a truly integrated data system. And philosophically, I’m right there behind you, but I also know that our accredited providers are corporate trainers. They are private businesses that don’t necessarily get federal dollars. So how do I help them understand the value of reporting their data when they don’t think they’re going to get anything from it?

Dr. Chris Mullin: Yeah, for sure. And one of the entities I mentioned is—there’s different entities doing this—but for example, the National Student Clearinghouse is one place where non-governmental, a private entity can go in and say, “Here’s my completers of my programs. Can you try and match them to the IRS and get earnings data back?” So that could happen, and they can say, “Okay, now I know that my MSS C two actually works.” Actually, the National Association of Manufacturers, to their credit, participated in a pilot of this to show it works, to work out the kinks. They have good understanding now about their certifications, and what happens with manufacturing certifications. So, I would encourage others to get information back. Having information is powerful as a company,

And it can help you market your things. If you know that somebody earns one of your certifications and results in a pay bump, that’s probably something your sales team wants to know. I think the sale is not too hard. Now I understand there’s a risk. You might run the data, and there’s no real impact, right? Well then, that’s good to know because it might have other value. It just might not have the economic value. Being honest and transparent with your customers matters a lot. Like Mike, I could probably use your help with what you offer and what you do. Is that going to mean a pay increase for me? Probably not. Is it going to help me be better at my job and keep my job? You know what I mean? And once I apply for another job, possibly get it. And so I think there’s different value for different types of credentials out there. That’s why I don’t have any problem with any of them. Just be transparent and clear about the intended outcome of what you’re providing.

Randy Bowman: Great insight. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. Well, Chris, there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, but we are near the end of our time here. So can you just tell me, what does a world that learns better look like to you?

Dr. Chris Mullin: This actually came up in one of your earlier episodes. So I do listen, and I encourage people to listen to the podcasts. I’m not just saying that because I’m on it, right? I think it was episode 20, and my background is I’ve been a K12 teacher, and I also earned a 60 credit hour Master’s from Columbia University in curriculum and instruction. And what we always thought about as teachers is how do you get students to mastery? Because getting students to mastery is the penultimate. If I know everything in Algebra 1, then I’m not going to really have a problem in Algebra 2. The way our education system has worked is if I know 75% of Algebra 1, I pass the class, I can go into Algebra 2 and the 25% I didn’t know in Algebra 1 now becomes a problem for me in Algebra 2.

This idea of getting competency, getting to mastery is really critically important. I think advancements in technology, advancements in learning science, advancements in just what we’ve learned as a country over the past 150 years since the common school movement really started has put us at a really exciting place. And so that’s what a world of better learning looks like to me, is one where individuals have a chance to get to mastery at any level of certification or credential possible because that way you have the firm footing to take the next step. And that’s really exciting.

Mike Veny: Chris, thank you so much for delivering an engaging and informative interview for us today. Randy, I just want this conversation to keep going, and I know we have to finish up here. I just want to tell you, I took so many notes. I’m going to actually just have to sit with them and just meditate over them. The micro learning, macro learning, and maintenance credentials and the importance of getting people to mastery. I mean, these are some of the things that I got out of the interview today. What about you?

Randy Bowman: I’m really excited about the ideas of ways of sharing more data in two-way systems, both providers giving data to central repositories and getting information back that they can use to either validate their own programs or to improve their own programs. I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what IACET’s all about is improvement through evaluation. And if we’re not evaluating our programs and evaluating our outcomes, how can we improve? And the best way to do that is with data. So, really appreciate Chris sharing those insights about that power of data. So, as we wrap up today’s discussion on making sense of the current credentialing chaos, would love to hear from you, our listeners, how are you using your credentials to upskill your life? Are you actively pursuing them or are you feeling lost and confused by today’s recognition markets? Don’t forget. You can submit topic ideas, suggestions for guests, review our archives, and more at the CET Talks website, available at cet-talks.org. And we certainly hope you’ll subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you don’t miss any of these exciting episodes. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we’ll look forward to having you return next time.

Host: You’ve been listening to CET Talks, the official podcast of IACET. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast. To learn more about IACET, visit IACET.org. That’s I-A-C-E-T.org. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a new episode.