The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth has emerged as one of the nation’s premier graduate academic medical centers, with six schools that specialize in patient-centered education, research, and health care. Without exception, HSC’s mission supports what higher education aspires to do in improving the lives not only of the citizens of our state, but also reaching those throughout the global community. Because of the importance of higher education, the state of Texas has united around the collective strengths of our institutions, which includes conducting world-class research, serving underrepresented student populations, and developing new certificate and degree programs quickly in response to evolving workforce needs with one thing in common: to help students succeed in being career ready.
Through the diligent work of a highly dedicated, cross-institutional task force, HSC adopted six essential career readiness skills as: communication, interprofessional teamwork, problem solving, leadership, resiliency, and intercultural fluency. We recognized that we needed a reliable means of fully capturing students’ acquisition of these skills in a formal system that also provided a way of legitimizing their mastery of these competencies on a certification level. Without hesitation, we set out to build a system for microcredentialing. During this session, it is our intent that these microcredentials be explicitly recognized by a host of industries and professions, and therefore provide a vast array of advantages through validation and attestation of industry-specified and highly sought-after workplace skills.
Following this program, you will be able to:
- Learn to verify, validate, and attest that specific skills and/or competencies have been achieved and are endorsed by the institution as a whole, having been developed through rigorous processes and designed to be meaningful and high quality;
- Understand how to define microcredentials as pathways comprised of milestones, each of which has associated requirements, and collect evidence that each of these requirements has been met; and
- Determine how various career-specific skills translate into microcredentials beyond the institution, and the implications for additional opportunities to deliver external, for-fee credentialing and continuing education to non-student populations.