Are micro-credentials the ticket for you?
Partly thanks to career pressures created by COVID-19, micro-credentials are catching on with B.C. universities, colleges and other providers. For students, these quick skills boosters can have a big impact
Samantha Kolb travelled to Sri Lanka three years ago to work for the United Nations, helping the country with its reconciliation process after its 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009. The Victoria native had taken the internship during her master's degree from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Kolb graduated in 2019, returning to B.C.
She planned to start her humanitarian career in earnest, continuing to work abroad in post-conflict reconstruction. Then the coronavirus pandemic struck, grounding global travel along with her ambitions. International nongovernmental organizations stopped hiring, with no way to predict when they'd start again.
Kolb realized she needed to make her CV more appealing to a broader range of employers. “I wanted a little bit more resilience to the changes that were happening,” she says. But Kolb had already earned two degrees—she started her BA in political science and international development at Halifax's Dalhousie University in 2011, completing it in 2016 before heading to grad school. She didn't want to spend more years and money earning a third.
So the 27-year-old enrolled in an eight-week digital marketing bootcamp run by Alacrity Canada, a Victoria-based nonprofit that promotes technology entrepreneurship. Instead of a degree, diploma or certificate, she earned a micro-credential—a certification that she had acquired a targeted set of skills in areas like branding, analytics and content distribution.