Janson Research & Strategy — Field Notes
Three cases reveal learning experience variants across the instructional spectrum.
Credential value is clearest when the learning experience, assessment, and professional purpose reinforce one another.
Relevant content is not necessarily sufficient to produce professional capability; learners may also need opportunities to apply, test, discuss, and receive feedback on what they know.
Completion is useful administrative data, but it cannot, by itself, inform providers what changed for the learner.
Every credential provider should be able to answer one deceptively difficult question: What does earning this credential actually prove?
There are more than 1.8 million unique credentials available in the United States, offered by more than 134,000 providers (Credential Engine, 2025a).
Represented in this number are degrees, occupational licenses, professional certifications, certificates, badges, microcredentials, and other ways of documenting that someone learned, completed, passed, demonstrated, or qualified. Credential Engine estimates that the ecosystem represents approximately $2.34 trillion in annual expenditures, making credentialing more than an educational phenomenon. It has become a substantial economic driver (Credential Engine, 2025a). At this scale, the meaning attached to a credential is no longer a minor semantic concern. Credentialing of all kinds determines what learners believe they are investing in and what employers believe credential holders know and can do.
Every credential, therefore, carries an implicit promise: earn this, and it will mean something. The problem is that something is carrying an enormous weight in that sentence. A credential might satisfy a regulatory requirement, demonstrate competence against a professional standard, document completion of a learning experience, validate existing knowledge, assist a candidate in qualifying for a role, or simply provide structure for learning something of use. Each outcome can have legitimate value, but the nature of that value varies from credential to credential. The preeminent challenge for a credential provider is therefore not convincing people that the credential matters; it is being precise about how it matters.
That precision becomes increasingly essential as the credential marketplace expands. Credential Engine has identified transparency as a central challenge in an ecosystem this large: learners, employers, and other stakeholders must comprehend what credentials represent, which skills or competencies underlie them, and how they align to education and employment opportunities (Credential Engine, 2025a, 2025b). Workcred has documented a similar challenge, identifying persistent confusion among certificates, certifications, licenses, and other credential types even though they may represent fundamentally different forms of achievement and assessment (Crawford et al., 2022; Good et al., 2020; Workcred, 2022). When the labels blur, so may the evidence that substantiates them.
The obstacle of alignment and validation extends into the nomenclature. To illustrate, visualize entering a grocery store where every package is labeled simply FOOD. One contains a comprehensive pre-cooked meal, another contains raw ingredients, another is a vitamin, and another is a cooking lesson. None of those products is inherently useless, but a single broad label tells the buyer almost nothing about what is actually inside. Credentialing has its own version of this problem: the umbrella term may be accurate yet conceal distinctions that matter enormously to the person deciding whether the investment is worthwhile.
Research on labor-market outcomes makes the picture substantially less tidy. Studies of certificates, technical awards, and other sub-baccalaureate credentials have found meaningful returns in many contexts, but those returns vary substantially across fields, credential lengths, programs, states, institutions, and learner populations (Carnevale et al., 2012, 2020; Dadgar & Trimble, 2015; Jepsen et al., 2014; Stevens et al., 2019; Xu & Trimble, 2016). Dadgar and Trimble (2015), for example, found greater variation in wage returns across fields of study than across credential types, while Xu and Trimble (2016) found significant variation even among certificate programs within the same field. The evidence, therefore, argues against treating "credentials" as a single intervention with a single expected return. The more useful question is narrower: Which credential, representing what evidence, for which learner, in which context?
The Currency of Credentials study aimed to examine certification and credentialing from both provider and learner perspectives. With the vast majority of study participants electing to represent the certification provider perspective, learner participant data were excluded from the analysis because the sample size was too small to yield reliable results. Rather than dismiss the contributions of participants who graciously gave their time to provide learner perspectives, we present their three responses here.
These learner responses are particularly instructive because they show how differently credential value can be experienced even when all three participants describe their programs as directly relevant to their professional lives. For confidentiality, they are referred to here as Sarah, Marcus, and Jen. Their names are pseudonyms; the substance of their responses is not. These cases cannot establish that a credential caused a promotion, increased someone's earnings, or transformed a career, but they can show how learners experienced the relationship among professional relevance, instructional design, assessment, and the credential itself.
Case Study 1: Sarah
When the Parts of the Credential Point in the Same Direction
Sarah's story is about her pursuit of a third-party professional certification in school-age child care. Her employer required or strongly recommended the credential, and she reported that it related directly to the work she performed every day. The organization provided coursework before the assessment, and Sarah completed the requirements and passed on her first attempt. Her experience, therefore, offers a useful case in which the credential's purpose, preparation, and assessment appear, at least from the learner's perspective, to have been mutually reinforcing.
Her responses contain remarkably little friction. When asked what could have improved the experience, Sarah wrote, "I had a great learning experience and don't know what could have made it better." She also reported that the course prepared her for the assessment interview and, most importantly, described the credential as "well structured" and "very effective in establishing competence in the field." Those comments matter because they go beyond satisfaction; Sarah was making a claim about what the credential represented. In her view, the training did not merely precede the assessment; it prepared her for an assessment she believed was connected to professional competence.
There is an obvious temptation to extend Sarah's story into the conventional ending of a commercial case study: a credential earned, a promotion received, a salary increased, a transformation complete. The available evidence does not permit that ending. What it does permit is a more precise observation: Sarah could see the logic of the credential. Her daily work connected to the learning, the learning prepared her for the assessment, and the assessment supported a conclusion she considered meaningful about her competence. That internal coherence is itself a form of value, because the learner does not have to reverse-engineer why the credential should matter after earning it.
Research on certification quality and validity helps explain why that coherence matters. Workcred describes high-quality certifications as grounded in defensible competency standards and third-party assessment rather than simply in participation or course completion (Good et al., 2020; Crawford et al., 2022). Broader quality frameworks for non-degree credentials similarly emphasize transparent competencies, credible assessment, labor-market relevance, and evidence that the credential serves an identifiable purpose (Workcred & National Governors Association, 2020). A rigorous assessment alone is not enough if it measures something disconnected from practice, just as an excellent curriculum cannot establish competence if the credential never asks the learner to demonstrate it. Sarah's case illustrates what happens when those parts appear to point toward the same destination.
A bridge is useful here as an analogy, but only because the structural relationship matters. A bridge can be beautifully engineered and still be useless if it crosses the wrong river; likewise, a credential can contain exceptional content and a demanding examination while remaining poorly aligned to the work it purports to represent. Sarah's experience suggests that the educational roadway, assessment structure, and professional destination were visible as parts of the same system. Her case, therefore, raises the first standard against which credential providers should examine their programs:
Do the parts of the credential make the same promise?
Case Study 2: Marcus
When the Content Is Relevant but the Learning Stops Short of Practice
Marcus pursued a completion-based program in artificial intelligence and emerging technology. His primary motivation was personal interest or curiosity, but the subject was not merely academic; he also reported that the material related directly to his everyday work. That combination is important because professional learners rarely arrive with one neat motivation. Curiosity, career development, practical need, validation, and professional identity can operate simultaneously, so a credential provider should be cautious about assuming that enrollment itself reveals what the learner hopes to gain.
Marcus generally rated important elements of the experience positively. The content was relevant, and his responses do not suggest broad dissatisfaction with the program. Yet when asked what would have improved it, he wanted "more collab with other colleagues and students to hear about their experience" and described a preference for learning that was "more project based." Time constraints also emerged as a barrier he encountered. His responses about assessment status are internally inconsistent: one indicates that preparation was complete but the assessment had not yet been taken, while another reports first-attempt success. His case, therefore, should not be forced into a simplistic completed-versus-incomplete narrative.
The more revealing part of Marcus's case is that he did not ask for more information. He asked for more opportunities to use information. That distinction matters because information has become almost absurdly abundant: a learner interested in artificial intelligence can access university courses, technical documentation, professional webinars, online communities, books, newsletters, videos, and generative AI systems that can explain the same concept at multiple levels of complexity. If a professional credential differentiates itself primarily by controlling access to information, it is competing in a market where information is increasingly inexpensive. Structured practice, expert feedback, consequential projects, and comparison with other practitioners remain far scarcer.
The difference is similar to studying a map and navigating an unfamiliar city. A good map can be accurate, detailed, and indispensable, but it cannot reproduce the experience of choosing between two imperfect routes, encountering an unexpected closure, or discovering that the attractive shortcut on the map is actually a staircase. Professional work is full of staircases. Knowing the principles of AI governance is not the same as deciding what governance an actual organization needs, and understanding a framework for evaluating AI tools is not the same as choosing among imperfect systems under constraints involving budget, security, privacy, staffing, and executive appetite for change. Project work creates some of that productive friction before the consequences are real.
Marcus's desire for peer interaction points to the same issue from another angle. Other learners matter not simply because "community" is pleasant but because they bring contexts the curriculum cannot manufacture. A practitioner implementing AI within a highly regulated institution will encounter a different set of constraints from someone working in a five-person company with almost no formal governance. Both may understand the same underlying concept perfectly well, yet their applications require different judgments. When professional education creates opportunities for learners to compare those cases, the conversation itself becomes part of the learning rather than an ornamental social feature.
This distinction between knowing and doing is consistent with the broader credential literature, although the labor-market evidence should be used with caution. Studies of sub-baccalaureate awards demonstrate substantial variation in economic returns across fields and programs, suggesting that a credential's occupational context matters greatly to its eventual value (Dadgar & Trimble, 2015; Xu & Trimble, 2016). Rivas et al. (2020) likewise found, in experimental hiring scenarios involving freelance web developers, that MOOC credentials did not function as straightforward substitutes for traditional credentials or relevant experience.
The studies do not tell us what Marcus personally gained from his program, but they reinforce the more modest conclusion his case supports: relevant content and demonstrated professional capability are related concepts, not synonyms.
Marcus's case, therefore, shifts the design question. It is not enough to ask whether learners considered the material relevant, because a course can cover exactly the right topic and still offer too little opportunity to practice the work that topic entails. A more demanding question is whether the learning experience allows participants to make decisions, build things, receive feedback, encounter ambiguity, and revise their thinking. If Sarah's case is about coherence, Marcus's is about conversion:
How does a credential convert relevant knowledge into usable capability?
Case Study 3: Jen
She Finished. That Does Not Finish the Analysis.
Jen completed a certificate in nonprofit leadership. Her motivations were explicitly professional: she wanted to advance her career or increase her earning potential, and she also sought formal validation of knowledge or skills she already possessed. The program was directly related to her daily work; she completed the credential successfully and reported feeling prepared for its rigor. By many conventional program metrics, Jen would therefore appear to be an uncomplicated success story.
The problem is that completion does not exhaust what Jen had to say about the program. Her blended experience included required live sessions, yet when asked what would have improved it, she wanted "more engagement from cohort members in discussions." She also wished the curriculum had placed "more of a focus on nonprofit resilience overall." Neither response suggests that she considered the program a failure; in fact, her broader responses were generally positive. What they show is more interesting: a learner can successfully complete and value a program while still identifying meaningful gaps in its design.
That creates a measurement problem for credential providers because completion is both useful and seductively easy to interpret. A hotel could proudly announce that 100% of its guests successfully checked out, and the number would be technically accurate while revealing almost nothing about the quality of their stay. It would not tell us whether the room was clean, whether the guests slept well, whether they would return, or whether one of them spent forty-five minutes trapped in an elevator. Credential completion has the same limitation: it confirms that the learner reached the end of an administrative sequence, but it cannot tell us what the experience produced.
Jen's comment about cohort engagement illustrates the problem particularly well. "Cohort-based" has acquired an aura of instructional sophistication, but a cohort is not an instructional strategy; it is an arrangement of people. Putting twenty professionals into the same Zoom room does not guarantee peer learning any more than placing twenty airline passengers in the same boarding group creates a mastermind. If interaction is expected to contribute to learning, participants need a substantive reason to depend on one another's thinking, perhaps by analyzing competing approaches, critiquing work, solving ambiguous cases, or examining how the same problem behaves in different organizational environments.
Jen's request for greater attention to nonprofit resilience raises a second issue: the difference between topical relevance and practice relevance. A program can legitimately teach nonprofit leadership while still devoting too little attention to the leadership challenges its learners consider most consequential. The same problem can occur in any field: an AI program can accurately teach artificial intelligence without requiring learners to make a meaningful implementation decision, and a cybersecurity course can cover cybersecurity while overlooking the threats most salient to a particular professional context. Learner feedback is therefore valuable not only for determining whether a program worked as designed but also for questioning whether it was designed around the right problems.
Jen's case ultimately challenges providers to resist equating a successful endpoint with a complete evaluation. Her credential was earned, and that matters, but it does not erase what the learner noticed along the way. If Marcus's case asks how knowledge becomes capability, Jen's asks a different question:
What does the provider fail to see when completion becomes the primary definition of success?
Emergent Patterns Across Three Distinct Credential Pathways
Taken together, the cases do not support ranking Sarah's experience as "good," Marcus's as "incomplete," and Jen's as "weak." They instead expose three dimensions of credential value that conventional program metrics can easily collapse into one. Sarah's experience is fundamentally about coherence among preparation, assessment, professional practice, and perceived competence. Marcus's is about the gap between relevant knowledge and applied capability. Jen's demonstrates the limitations of completion as a proxy for value. Examined together, the cases move the conversation away from whether a learner earned the credential and toward what that achievement is meant to signify.
The distinction between learned material and certificate bestowed matters, because the credential itself is only the artifact; the evidence behind it determines what claim the artifact can responsibly carry. Workcred distinguishes certificates from certifications on the basis that certificates may document education, training, knowledge, or skills, whereas professional certifications generally involve an independent process intended to establish that a person meets defined competency requirements (Crawford et al., 2022; Good et al., 2020; Workcred, 2022). Beverley et al. (2024), approaching credentials from the perspective of occupational ontology, likewise illustrate how difficult it becomes to represent credential types and relationships consistently when organizations use overlapping terminology for substantively different qualifications. The terminology problem is therefore not a matter of pedantry; it affects what learners and employers reasonably infer from the credential.
This leads to the question that every provider should be able to answer without retreating into marketing language: What does earning this credential actually prove? If the certificate indicates that a learner completed a well-designed educational experience, it serves as useful validation. If the credential demonstrates mastery of a defined body of knowledge, say that. If it certifies professional competence, the evidence used to award it should support that stronger claim. If the exam functions as an occupational gate, the relationship to employment or regulation should be explicit. Precision does not make a credential less impressive; it makes the credential more trustworthy, because the promise and the evidence remain proportional.
A receipt provides a useful analogy because its evidentiary limits are obvious. A receipt proves that something was purchased; it does not prove that the buyer knows how to use it, benefits from it, or can demonstrate competence with it. Completion-based credentials are not "just receipts"; many represent substantial and valuable learning. But the analogy highlights the danger of allowing one form of evidence to carry a claim it was never designed to support. The correct question is therefore not whether one credential type is inherently superior to another, but whether the evidence behind the credential is sufficient for the meaning attached to it.
The Data Esteemed Worthy—and the Data Ignored
Why organizations struggle to demonstrate credential value
Credential providers frequently possess excellent data about program activity and considerably weaker data about post-program value. Providers are cognizant of how many people enrolled, how many finished, how many passed, and often how satisfied participants said they were immediately afterward. These measures are relatively easy to capture because they occur inside systems the provider controls. Yet it is in the omitted data that the credential sector runs into an uncomfortable measurement problem. The more consequential the questions, the harder they become to verify.
Did learners apply the knowledge six months later? Did their professional responsibilities change? Did an employer recognize the credential? Did supervisors observe stronger performance? Did learners earn promotions, move into new roles, or increase their earnings? Was the credential portable across employers? Did anyone outside the issuing organization know what it meant?
These questions play out later and often require longitudinal follow-up or data that the provider does not possess. The result is predictable: organizations become highly sophisticated at measuring what is available rather than necessarily what is consequential.
The existing research demonstrates why post-program outcomes cannot be reduced to a single metric or a generic statement about "credential value." Labor-market returns to certificates and other sub-baccalaureate credentials vary substantially by field, gender, institution, credential type, and local labor-market context (Carnevale et al., 2012, 2020; Dadgar & Trimble, 2015; Jepsen et al., 2014; Stevens et al., 2019; Xu & Trimble, 2016). Dadgar and Trimble (2015) found that returns to community-college credentials varied markedly by field, with long-term certificates and associate degrees producing stronger wage returns in some contexts than short-term certificates. Xu and Trimble (2016) found positive overall effects for certificates in two states but substantial variation across fields, individual programs, and state contexts; they also noted that employment gains can occur even when short-term earnings do not capture the full value of a credential. These findings make a strong methodological point: even an apparently objective outcome, such as earnings, offers a limited view into the value of credentials.
Athey and Palikot (2024) add a different form of evidence, showing that the relationship between a credential and an individual's job substantially affects the apparent labor-market value. In a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners who had completed Coursera courses, primarily learners in developing countries without college degrees, the researchers encouraged credential sharing on professional networking platforms. The intervention increased credential sharing, and the treated group was more likely to report new employment and employment related to the certificate. The findings illustrate how making a nontraditional credential visible can affect labor-market signaling for at least some learners, but the sample and intervention matter; the study should not be generalized into a claim that all nontraditional credentials produce comparable employment effects. Such limitations are precisely why credential providers need outcome evidence tied to their own claims and populations.
Asking whether credentials "work," then, is a bit like asking whether medicine works. Which medicine? For which condition? At what dose? For which patient? Compared with what alternative? The category is too broad for the question. A professional certification, a regulatory license, a six-week certificate, an employer-issued badge, and a nonprofit leadership program may all qualify as credentials, but they should not be expected to produce identical outcomes, and providers should not measure them as though they do.
The measurement strategy should follow the promise. If the promise is learning, measure learning. If the promise is competence, assess competence. If the promise is improved professional practice, collect evidence of application. If the promise is employer recognition, ask employers. And if the promise, explicitly or implicitly, is career mobility or economic value, providers eventually need to examine what happens to people's careers. These measures are harder and more expensive than calculating a completion rate, but they are also much closer to the value proposition on which the learner made the investment.
Practice Implications for Credential Providers
The three cases cannot establish what works across the credential sector, but read alongside the existing research, they point to four areas where providers can examine their own programs.
Completion rates alone cannot capture the value of credentials. Sarah passed a formal assessment she considered meaningful. Marcus's assessment status is ambiguous even in his own responses. Jen completed her program and still identified gaps in its design. A single completion rate would flatten all three experiences into the same number. The fundamental quality distinction in the research, between credentials that certify demonstrated competence and those that document participation or completion, is frequently obscured in program marketing, difficult for employers and learners to discern without access to comparative data, and rarely examined empirically across program types (Good et al., 2020; Workcred, 2022; Beverley et al., 2024). Providers seeking valid outcome assessment should ask: What proportion of enrolled learners proceed through formal assessment to credential completion? Do learners demonstrate the transfer of applied competence within six months of completion? What happens to credential holders afterward? Assessment rigor encompasses far more than enrollment metrics.
Assessment transparency signals a commitment to quality. Sarah could see how her coursework, her assessment interview, and her professional competence connected; the logic of the credential was visible to her. The less visible the logic, the more learners and employers are left to infer what a credential certifies. Assessment rigor depends on job-task analysis, assessment design, governance, employer engagement, and transparent candidate information (Crawford et al., 2022). When providers clearly communicate their assessment architecture (the occupational competencies undergirding assessment, the validation evidence supporting assessment methods, and the real-world application scenarios assessments operationalize), they make the credential's claim easier to understand and to trust.
Peer engagement is program infrastructure, not an amenity. Marcus and Jen both asked for more substantive interaction with fellow learners, and Jen did so despite a program that required live sessions. Scheduling learners together does not by itself produce peer learning. Certificate programs and microcredentials can claim skill attainment only when program design includes clear learning outcomes, valid assessment evidence, and transparent issuer standards (Workcred, 2022; Workcred, 2023c). Peer engagement that serves those outcomes requires deliberate structural investment: real-time facilitation, structured feedback mechanisms, and collaborative problem-solving requirements that give learners a genuine reason to rely on one another's thinking.
Employer recognition determines labor-market portability. Sarah's employer required or strongly recommended her certification, a clear sign that the credential carried meaning within her workplace. A completion-based credential in a fast-moving field, such as Marcus's, may not carry an equally established signal. Credentials cannot produce mobility unless hiring systems, supervisors, and institutional partners can see, understand, and trust the credential signal (Athey & Palikot, 2024; Rivas et al., 2020; Workcred & NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership, 2018). Credential value depends partly on what the credential measures and partly on whether hiring infrastructure can register, value, and act upon that signal. Providers should engage systematically with employers so that credentials are understood within hiring workflows and HRIS platforms.
Each of these areas matters because of what learners invest: months of professional time, monetary expenditure, intellectual labor, and a measure of personal risk. Aggregated outcome data rarely show whether that investment produced the return the learner expected.
Completion Is an Event. Value Is an Outcome.
Sarah, Marcus, and Jen do not offer three neat stories of credentials that succeeded or failed. Instead, they offer something more useful: three perspectives on the mechanisms through which credential value is created or constrained. Sarah's story demonstrates the power of alignment when professional relevance, preparation, assessment, and perceived competence reinforce one another. Marcus's shows that relevant content may still leave a learner wanting the practice, feedback, and exchange necessary to turn knowledge into capability. Jen's narrative demonstrates that successful completion can coexist with meaningful gaps in curriculum and interaction.
None of those experiences is adequately captured by asking whether the learner reached the end of the program. That is why completion is an event; value is an outcome. In an ecosystem containing more than 1.8 million credentials, the distinction becomes increasingly consequential because learners need to understand what they are investing in, employers need to understand what the resulting signal means, and providers need evidence strong enough to support the promises their credentials make (Credential Engine, 2025a). The next stage of credential quality is therefore not simply about creating more programs or persuading more participants to complete them; it is about becoming considerably more precise about what finishing is supposed to mean.
Every credential makes a promise. Trust begins when the evidence behind it is strong enough to keep that promise.
Assess Your Program's Credential Strategy
Credential program providers seeking to evaluate whether their programs are producing intended outcomes have limited frameworks for honest self-assessment. The questions Sarah, Marcus, and Jen raise about coherence, conversion, and completion apply well beyond their individual programs.
Take the self-audit. It walks you through the four dimensions where credentials succeed or fail: program design and occupational alignment, assessment methodology and rigor, peer engagement infrastructure, and employer recognition mechanisms. The audit produces a candid picture of your program's strengths and gaps, grounded in research evidence and learner experience.
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If the audit reveals gaps you want to address strategically, JANSON Research & Strategy offers consultation on credential program redesign. Consultations are structured around the Currency of Credentials findings, your program's own data, and evidence-based recommendations for improvement.
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*Learner names are pseudonyms. Quotations are drawn from open-ended responses in the Currency of Credentials study. Cases are illustrative and should not be interpreted as statistically representative of the study population.
References
Athey, S., & Palikot, E. (2024). The value of non-traditional credentials in the labor market. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.00247
Beverley, J., McGill, R., Smith, S., Zheng, J., De Colle, G., Wilson, F., Diller, M., Duncan, W. D., Hogan, W. R., & He, Y. (2024). Credentials in the occupation ontology. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.00186
Carnevale, A. P., Garcia, T. I., Ridley, N., & Quinn, M. C. (2020). The overlooked value of certificates and associate's degrees: What students need to know before they go to college. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CEW-SubBA.pdf
Carnevale, A. P., Rose, S. J., & Hanson, A. R. (2012). Certificates: Gateway to gainful employment and college degrees. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Certificates.FullReport.061812.pdf
Crawford, S., Albert, K., Cardenas-Navia, I., Elzey, K., Forte, J., Ganzglass, E., Goldberg, M., Good, L., & Swift, R. (2022). Certifications: The ideal, reality, and potential. Workcred. https://share.ansi.org/wc/Shared%20Documents/Workcred-Reports/Understanding-Certifications-Study/Certifications-The-Ideal-Reality-and-Potential.pdf
Credential Engine. (2025a). Counting credentials 2025. https://credentialengine.org/all-resources/2025-counting-credentials/
Credential Engine. (2025b). Counting credentials, in context 2025: The opportunities of digital credentials. https://credentialengine.org/all-resources/credentials-in-context-2025/
Dadgar, M., & Trimble, M. J. (2015). Labor market returns to sub-baccalaureate credentials: How much does a community college degree or certificate pay? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 37(4), 399–418. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373714553814
Good, L., Ganzglass, E., Crawford, S., Albert, K., Swift, R., Elzey, K., & Cardenas-Navia, I. (2020). Understanding certifications. Workcred. https://workcred.org/Documents/Understanding-Certifications-Report-Dec-2020.pdf
Jepsen, C., Troske, K., & Coomes, P. (2014). The labor-market returns to community college degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Journal of Labor Economics, 32(1), 95–121. https://doi.org/10.1086/671809
Rivas, M. J., Baker, R. B., & Evans, B. J. (2020). Do MOOCs make you more marketable? An experimental analysis of the value of MOOCs relative to traditional credentials and experience. AERA Open, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858420973571
Stevens, A. H., Kurlaender, M., & Grosz, M. (2019). Career technical education and labor market outcomes: Evidence from California community colleges. Journal of Human Resources, 54(4), 986–1036. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.54.4.1015.7449R2
Workcred. (2022). The role of certificates in signifying knowledge and skills attainment. https://share.ansi.org/wc/Shared%20Documents/Workcred-Reports/The-Role-of-Certificates-in-Signifying-Knowledge-and-Skills-Attainment.pdf
Workcred. (2023c). Integrating microcredentials into undergraduate experiences. https://workcred.org/Publications-and-Events/Reports
Workcred & National Governors Association. (2020). Understanding quality: The role of states in supporting quality non-degree credentials. https://workcred.org/Documents/Understanding-Quality-Workcred-NGA-Report-2020.pdf
Workcred & NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership. (2018). Examining the quality, market value, and effectiveness of manufacturing credentials in the United States. https://workcred.org/Documents/NIST-MEP-Report.pdf
Xu, D., & Trimble, M. (2016). What about certificates? Evidence on the labor market returns to nondegree community college awards in two states. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(2), 272–292. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373715617827
Study Information
The Currency of Credentials was designed as a two-sided investigation of credential quality, relevance, assessment, AI practice, and value, drawing on both credential providers and learners. Data were collected through an online survey between July 15 and August 24, 2026.
Provider findings: The primary analysis draws on 24 provider-track respondents, concentrated in professional associations and third-party professional certification. Recruitment used purposive outreach and chain-referral sampling; the sample is exploratory and not nationally representative.
Learner cases: Three learner-track respondents and one Phase 2 follow-up participant took part. Because those responses were too few to support trustworthy aggregate findings, they were excluded from the primary synthesis and retained as illustrative case material. The three cases presented here draw on those responses. Names are pseudonyms, and quotations are drawn from open-ended responses, with minor typographic corrections that do not alter meaning.
Full research findings: Detailed methodology, sample composition, and complete findings appear in the Currency of Credentials research report.
Consultation and assessment: JANSON Research & Strategy offers credential program providers a self-audit tool grounded in the Currency of Credentials research framework, as well as consultation services for evidence-based program redesign.
