Time for Micro-Credentials

Citizens - at home and at work - will get accustomed to get all sorts of credentials to their identity wallets. One important life event for the citizen at home is the job application and at work the need to find skills to employ or deploy.

The first step for education and qualification providers in all sectors is to deploy their own identity applications so that citizens can get their skill-credentials to their wallets in the same way from all sources. Providing the economy of repetition, economy of reuse and economy of trust. This will create a market for service providers specialising in helping citizens to deploy wallets, find existing credentials and with the help of AI locate opportunities for new skill credentials. With technology and markets leaping ahead with increasing speed it is obvious that a new approach is needed in education, research and on-the-job learning - the short courses leading to real-time issue of micro-credentials to the job applicants wallet for on-warding to the potential employer - without disclosing names, ages, sexes etc if not needed. 

At work citizens will ask if management and HR-organisations are up to speed. Do they have a real time view of what skills exist in the organisation? Do they know what is needed tomorrow morning and where it can be found? Is it economical or even possible to try to keep track of everything on their own? Are sector-specific skill-consultants the answer? Do sector-specific consultants have the now needed general purpose SSI-wallet skills - avoiding traps like credential-specific integrations? What kind of packages should be on offer to SMEs? If the accounting firms would not be so conservative and busy with manual work one could se an opportunity for them to start offering teams as part-time finance-, procurement, innovation-, resourcing-, HR-, regulation specialists - co-innovating with the many.. To me it appears clear that there is a big sleeping demand for generalists here.