A Texas-Sized Push for Microcredentials

A certificate program that broadens the job prospects for students in traditional liberal arts fields. Another certificate that allows art students to demonstrate mastery of design software. A skills badge that helps bioscience students demonstrate to employers that they know their way around a lab.

Within the University of Texas System, nine UT campuses have each embarked on their own microcredential offerings designed to meet the regional needs of their student populations, and a new partnership with Coursera makes online professional training available to all UT students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

The Texas Credentials for the Future program helps universities close the gap between the skills employers need and what students learn in a degree program. Rather than place the responsibility on students to find opportunities to develop practical skills related to their education, credentialing programs like the UT System’s add a layer of training onto degree studies that helps students signal to employers their readiness to apply their education.

Here’s a closer look at microcredential offerings at three of those campuses — The University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and The University of Texas at Austin.

Five years ago Alma Roman of Fort Worth, Texas, was a 38-year-old teaching assistant and mother of two who hadn’t been a student in more than two decades. But with a divorce looming and a resolute determination to support herself and her family, Roman set her sights on a college degree.

“I wanted to be independent in terms of not relying on anybody else but myself,” Roman said. “I wanted to take care of myself financially.” 

Her journey began with earning her GED. Next up: community college, an associate degree, and a transfer to The University of Texas at Arlington, where she could fulfill her dream of a four-year degree. But as she neared graduation, Roman learned of one more opportunity at UT Arlington that would expand her skills and make her more marketable as an employee, yet could be completed during her remaining semester of college.

The program, called Power Up + Tech Up, provides students access to a Google Career Certificate. Funded in part by Strada Education Foundation’s Beyond Completion Challenge, nine UT campuses have each embarked on their own microcredential offerings designed to meet the regional needs of their student populations. 

UT Arlington prides itself as being among the most diverse four-year institutions in the country, with a population that is 60 percent students of color, 40 percent Pell Grant-eligible, and more than 50 percent first-generation college students. By combining a degree with a skills-based microcredential, graduates hope to prepare themselves for immediate employment in a quality first job after graduation.

“We are interested in motivating students, recruiting students, and educating our students beyond their degree,” said Robin Macaluso, a UT Arlington associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the faculty fellow leading the Power Up + Tech Up program. “They can expand their technical skill set and be more competitive as they launch their careers once they graduate from UTA.”

In launching the Power Up + Tech Up program, UT Arlington initially targeted transfer students but quickly expanded to include all students from any major. Because the program pairs development of high-demand skills such as communication, teamwork, and critical thinking with earning a skills-based microcredential, Power Up + Tech Up builds on students’ degrees to position UT Arlington graduates for early- and long-term career successes.   

“We know students come to UT Arlington with a career mindset,” said Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Tamara L. Brown, who noted that a recent survey of undergraduates found more than half prioritize career preparation alongside academics in their university experience. “When we prepare a student with a degree from UT Arlington and include a microcredential or high-demand skills credential, we prepare our graduates for successful careers starting with high-value positions. 

“Our degrees prepare students for longer-term career success,” Brown continued. “The skills-based microcredentials often help place them into high-paying jobs right after college.”

The Google Career Certificate is just one microcredential offering at UT Arlington. In addition to Power Up + Tech Up, the university also has embedded Adobe Certified Professional exams into its art and art history courses and is looking into opportunities to couple microcredentials with other liberal arts degrees.

Rebecca Deen, associate dean of UT Arlington’s College of Liberal Arts, said one sign of success is that many art students, though initially reluctant to pursue a professional certification through their course, have gone on to seek higher levels of Adobe certification after completing their class and the initial certification embedded within it.

“These are students who are not inherently true believers in either microcredentialing or the need for Adobe,” Deen said. “They leave the class not only with the grade, not only with credit toward graduation, but also with the certification at no cost to them beyond the tuition and fees.”

Roman, the former teaching assistant, graduated with honors in spring 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in social work. The microcredential she earned through Power Up + Tech Up, she said, has made her think more broadly about what a career spent helping people might look like.

Armed with her Google IT Support Certificate, she is looking for jobs in both social work and information technology.

“As an IT support computer specialist, you help solve problems,” she said. “That’s also helping people, like with social work. You help them in a different capacity.”

As a humanities professor who has been teaching in his field for more than two decades, Jude Okpala has encountered all the most common criticisms of his discipline: that the study of humanities doesn’t lead to employment, for instance, or that its graduates do not find immediate economic success in the work world.

That’s why, when Okpala first learned of The University of Texas at San Antonio’s plans to embed microcredentials into existing courses and degree programs, he knew he wanted his humanities students to participate.

“Connecting the humanities to the microcredential is a way, really, to not only take into consideration all of this critique of the humanities, but to create a bridge between the study of the humanities and employment,” said Okpala, professor of instruction in the Department of Philosophy and Classics at UT at San Antonio.

The program at UT at San Antonio is part of the University of Texas System’s embrace of microcredentials. Funded in part by Strada Education Foundation’s Beyond Completion Challenge, nine UT campuses have embarked on their own microcredential offerings designed to meet the regional needs of their student populations, and a new partnership with Coursera makes online professional training available to all UT students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

In San Antonio, a data analysis revealed three majors — humanities, modern languages, and women’s studies — produced graduates who earned less than in other fields of study. “We wanted to address the equity gaps,” said Claudia Arcolin, executive director of teaching and learning experiences at UT at San Antonio. “We wanted to identify the majors where a microcredential can have the most impact for our students.”

As part of a pilot project, students were offered the opportunity to complete a Grow With Google certificate as part of their coursework.

“At first, when I was offered to take the Google Project Management Certificate through my humanities course, it didn’t really seem like they would mesh,” said Sofia Cavenaile, a UT at San Antonio senior. “But the more I went through the course, the more I realized these really were related. And the skills that you learn in the certification could be applied to pretty much every class and every job that you would be in.”

Cavenaile was enrolled in the Grow With Google course while working part-time as a legal assistant at a law office and found immediate ways to apply her new skills to her job.

The law office was moving, and Cavenaile’s role included leading coordination of the movers, the office staff, and the materials to be relocated.

“So while I was taking the course and doing this moving project at the same time, I put to use the skills that I was learning in the course into the project,” Cavenaile said. “It was directly applicable to why I was taking the course.”

JoAnn Browning, interim vice president for research, economic development, and knowledge at UT at San Antonio, said the microcredentials program is popular with regional employers who believe they give students skills that not only help them be more competitive for jobs, but also allow them to meet their employers’ needs from the first day of employment.

“How can we serve our students better to make them feel more successful when they get out and be more successful overall?” Browning said. “The employers are a really critical part of this whole feedback loop, and they are absolutely an important part of how we design future microcredentials.”

UT at San Antonio is now expanding its Grow With Google certificates beyond the three original majors. More areas of study have been added to the initiative, and students will explore several professional certificates to gain data analytics, entrepreneurial, and digital communication skills.

“It allows you to reinterpret the skills that you gained through the classics – problem solving, critical thinking,” Arcolin said, “and how they can be used in the current marketplace.”

Molly Feldner had nearly everything she needed to pursue a career in her dream field: astrobiology, where she hopes to study human colonization of space and maybe live there herself one day.

She had the grades. The passion. The plan. The one missing piece? Undergraduate experience in a research lab.

“I had been in the lab courses. I had read the textbooks and the protocols. I knew how to do it. I had practiced it, but I hadn’t put it to work, basically,” recalled Feldner, a University of Texas at Austin senior majoring in molecular biology and anthropology. 

One interaction with a professor directed Feldner to a breakthrough opportunity. The professor told her about a new molecular sciences skill-up program that allowed Feldner to train intensely for four weeks on lab protocols, earn a skills badge to recognize what she had learned, and qualify for a paid opportunity in a research lab that typically hires only graduate students.

“When I applied to this lab, I basically had a whole new resume with that microcredential on it, too, as the crown jewel,” said Feldner, now an undergraduate research assistant in molecular biosciences professor Arlen Johnson’s lab, where she helps study how cells manufacture ribosomes.

The badging program at UT Austin is part of the University of Texas System’s embrace of microcredentials. Funded in part by Strada Education Foundation’s Beyond Completion Challenge, nine UT campuses have embarked on their own microcredential offerings designed to meet the regional needs of their student populations.

The program is one example of how universities are looking to close the gap between the skills employers need and how those students learn and develop in a degree program. Rather than place the responsibility on students to find opportunities to develop practical skills related to their education — such as internships or work-based learning opportunities — credentialing programs like the UT System’s add a layer of training onto their degree studies that helps students signal to employers their readiness to apply their education.

UT Austin was trying to solve dilemmas like Feldner’s when it launched its Biotech Skill-Up program, targeted at undergraduates who need lab experience to develop the fundamental skills required to work professionally in a lab, but struggle to get those opportunities because they lack the very skills they are looking to develop. The badging program provided another avenue to develop those skills, helping to catapult them to their next level — in a first biotech industry job, into graduate studies, or into a work-based learning opportunity in a research lab.

The program offers distinct, verifiable skills on topics that might be introduced in a bachelor’s degree program but not specifically taught and tested — skills such as how to properly use a pipette, a tool commonly used in chemistry and biology to transport a measured volume of liquid.

“Often there are these career-level skills that slip through the cracks of the curriculum a little bit,” said Art Markman, vice provost for academic affairs at UT Austin. “To help our students to bridge the gap between the things that they’re learning in a class and the things that they might need on day one when they enter a company, we have a variety of different programs that students can participate in.

“By participating in those and demonstrating that they’ve reached a particular competence,” Markman continued, “they then get a badge that they can display to prospective employers.”

In Austin, the badging program targets undergraduate students in biology and chemistry. Unlike their higher-earning STEM field counterparts in engineering and computer science, UT Austin students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biology or chemistry earned an annual average salary of $40,000 five years after graduation. 

The program was born during a period of curriculum reform at UT Austin. “We were talking to alumni, we were talking to industry partners, we were talking to current students about their experiences,” said Cynthia LaBrake, a professor of instruction at UT Austin who leads the molecular sciences badging program on campus. “What we were hearing was, ‘I wish I would have had more time in the lab. I wish I would have developed more skills.’

“We talked to our local industry partners and asked them, ‘What skills would you like to see a B.S.-level person coming to your company with? Will you work with us to develop those skills?’” 

The intensive training and digital badge awarded upon mastery of the skill are primarily designed to open doors, she said. What comes next: a paid opportunity to further practice the skill in a lab environment. Of the nine students who participated in the pilot program in spring 2023, five earned paid lab placements for the summer.

“Most students have to work,” LaBrake said. “They couldn’t even start to participate in our skill-up if there wasn’t a guaranteed paycheck for the summer. With this four-week skill-up, you’re skilling up to something — an opportunity to step foot in a door that would be closed otherwise.”

The microcredentials program was made possible through earnest conversations with the university’s faculty governing body. While curriculum changes continue to receive robust scrutiny and review, the microcredentials program can be more agile and reactive to employer needs.

Both LaBrake and Markman call the microcredentials program “a sandbox” where they can try new things.

“Universities change slowly, and for good reason. We don’t want to change with the tides. We want to be providing knowledge that stands the test of time,” Markman said. “But there’s also a need to be able to adapt to workforce needs, to be able to adapt to new technologies that are coming out.”

With access to the lab experience she needed,, Feldner is making the most of the opportunity.

“The scope of the program really helped me improve my lab skills,” Feldner said. “It’s really important to me because I want to work in the lab. That’s kind of how I want to spend my life — if I don’t end up in space.”