Ireland is experiencing skills gaps at every level of enterprise, from SMEs to multinationals.
MicroCreds, is a collective initiative from Ireland’s top universities that is helping to bridge the gap with short-form training designed to upskill workforces fast.
MicroCreds is led by the Irish Universities Association (IUA), the courses are enterprise-led, university-accredited and allow learners to gather skills and competencies in a flexible and affordable way.
Hundreds of bite-sized courses are available at MicroCreds.ie. Most last between five and 12 weeks in duration and each requires on average just a few hours attendance a week, either online or in a blended format that mixes on-screen classes with on-campus lectures and self-paced learning that can be done around a learners other commitments.
Enterprise directed
“Attraction and retention of talent is still the most significant challenge businesses face,” says Tony Donohoe, chair of the MicroCreds enterprise advisory group and former head of education policy at Ibec, the employers’ group.
“Employers also need the ability to stay ahead of both technological and regulatory trends.”
Most recognise the importance of upskilling staff but finding the right provider can be a challenge.
“Traditionally the education and training sector would have had difficulty keeping up, whereas MicroCreds are short pieces of learning brought to market quickly by universities,” says Donohoe.
Businesses also traditionally struggled to release staff, while staff themselves struggled to juggle training with work and home life.
“These flexible courses work around the person’s commitments as well as being designed to meet business needs,” he adds.
MicroCreds’ enterprise advisory group is made up of business organisations representing both large multinationals and smaller companies, as well as industrial development agencies.
“Employees always want to work with companies that are willing to invest in their potential, while businesses are willing to invest in programmes that meet their business needs. What MicroCreds does is find the sweet spot in the middle,” he explains.
The micro-credential courses are accredited by the university delivering the training. Each course has a credit range of between 1 and 30 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTs), which are internationally recognised.
Key skills focus areas include zero carbon goals within an organisation, digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as sectors such as bio-pharma-chem, food and agriculture.
“Of course businesses need experts, but they also need the generalists who have an understanding of, for example AI, and the opportunities and threats it brings,” he points out.
“Micro-credentials provide learning that people can tack on to their core functions.”
Research-led
As IUA MicroCreds project lead at University College Cork, Mags Arnold helps businesses to identify and secure the training they need.
One of her most recent courses was developed in collaboration with medical technology company Stryker.
UCC ran two micro-credential courses for Stryker on human anatomy, blending online content and in person workshops at the Assert Centre in UCC’s College of Medicine and Health
“The idea was to give participants, many of whom were new to anatomy, a greater understanding of how their work can be applied to the human body at a more complex level,” she explains.
Every micro-credential goes through the same rigorous academic scrutiny of all programmes in UCC. “We’ve just speeded up the process and made it leaner, to fit enterprise timelines rather than traditional academic timelines,” she explains.
Mags’ advice to enterprises looking to plug a skills gap is to get in touch with the project lead at the IUA university they want to work with.
“They will support you through the entire process. You don’t have to have a fully designed programme in mind. You may see something on our book of courses that will suit you, or we can design it to meet your needs,” she says.
“The MicroCreds project is about linking with industry to ask them what they want, rather than designing a course in abstract and hoping it is what industry needs. It’s about developing something that matches their needs now and into the future, to future-proof their business.”
Learner benefits
Eoin Connolly is a senior staff R & mechanical design engineer at Stryker. He joined the company in 2016 and works in neurological instrumentation, developing the equipment surgeons use in a patient’s head or back to gain access to tumours.
“It’s about problem solving – finding a solution and creating a resolution,” he says.
The anatomy micro-credential at UCC “treated us less like engineers and more like medical students,” he explains.
It involved demonstrations on specimens, which was hugely fruitful for his work. “What is incredible for me is when a surgeon can speak to me in what we call native or medical language and not dumb it down, because we start to lose understanding of what they mean when they do that,” says Connolly.
“For example, if I ask you how to change a bicycle tyre you’ll tell me you need to take off the tyre and get to the tube. But if I ask you to show me, you’ll turn the bicycle upside down and take the wheel off first, which you never mentioned. At Stryker we want to converse naturally with surgeons so we can squeeze as much expertise out of every interaction with them as possible.”
The micro-credential at UCC offered a mix of online lectures and quizzes, plus the lab-based workshops.
“We have human-like models at work but models are generic, whereas real life patients are all different. They are different ages, genders, some are smokers, others are non-smokers and so on. The micro-credential gave me a greater appreciation of everything the surgeon has to factor in, to understand, know and be expert in. I kept all my lecture notes and review them before I talk to a surgeon now,” he adds.
Lifelong learning is important to Connolly. “Even outside of a course or a career, most people like to grow,” he says.
“For me the accreditation is the icing on the cake because the knowledge is the thing. I’m an engineer by birth, not training. I’m inquisitive by nature and I think this is brilliant.”
Find out how MicroCreds.ie can help upskill your business now