A Degree Should Be More Than a Piece of Paper

For many workers, a degree may be a way to break “the paper ceiling:” a way of meeting a requirement for a job listing or promotion to help make them competitive. This can be especially useful for adult learners like those University of Phoenix was founded to serve, who may have a lot of experience in the workplace, but not as much in the classroom. But an education should be about more than checking a box. Instead, to give learners tools they need to pursue real-world success, degrees, certificates, and training should help students learn the real-world skills they’re intended to provide. Moreover, rather than be seen as more important or valid than experience, education should come together with what workers learned in the field to represent a full picture of what they’re capable of.

This is where University of Phoenix’s skills-aligned curriculum can help. Not only does this curriculum serve adult learners—who are able to make fully informed decisions about the courses and programs they pursue—but it can also serve their employers. Supervisors and hiring managers can have instant visibility into what skills workers have earned through their education.

As University of Phoenix continues to evolve how courses and programs are designed, skills-aligned learning bridges the gaps between workers and employers and lay a foundation for innovative ways of capturing a worker’s entire skillset in reliable and trustworthy records.

University of Phoenix’s Curriculum Aligns to Real-World Skills

By creating courses and curriculum to teach real-world skills to workers and learners, University of Phoenix undertook a transformational effort to align programs to the skills being taught—skills learners need and can use to pursue their career success. When a learner receives their degree, they are able to point directly to the skills they practiced and honed while learning. This has allowed workers to show their employers or prospective employers what skills they have learned through their education—and more importantly, it assures learners themselves that their education was designed to be linked to tangible gains in their abilities and potential. A degree has become more than a piece of paper: It can be a real representation of effort and skill to take pride in, as well as to highlight for employers.

At University of Phoenix, every single course now available for enrollment—be it a part of a program or a standalone effort—is mapped to the skills that students can develop by taking them. Now a learner can point to what each course provides them, a level of detail that they can carry with confidence into every job interview or performance evaluation.

University of Phoenix built on this foundational approach to skills-alignment by working with Credly to provide a badging and credentialing system that allows learners to share this information with ease, providing them with the information they need to show employers their related skills. These badges, in conjunction with University of Phoenix career-focused ecosystem including the Career Navigator and Career Services for Life® commitment, showcase our students’ accomplishments and give them the tools they need to continue putting their real-world skills to work.

Furthermore, because University of Phoenix offers credit for prior learning, work, and life experience, our learners’ degrees don’t replace or stand in for the skills they’ve developed over their careers: they reaffirm them, providing workers with one more way of representing, and taking pride in, what they bring to the workplace.

Continuing to Innovate Our Skills-Based Curriculum

As students’ and employers’ needs continue to evolve, so do University of Phoenix’s solutions. With skills-based programs and courses in place, we’ve laid the foundation for future efforts including learner employment records (LERs), which leverage Web 3.0 technology into a verifiable record of what workers have learned and accomplished. This in turn is one step towards creating a comprehensive learner record (CLR), a singular repository of all of these skills and achievements. These next steps will make it even easier for learners and employers to connect and benefit from an employee’s education and work experience.

As the future of professional development and hiring shifts and grows in the future, University of Phoenix will continue to grow alongside and even ahead as well. A skills-based curriculum lets a student know what they will learn, how they will learn it, and how they can use it in the real world. Mapping every program and course available for enrollment to real-world skills can be a major benefit for every stakeholder, but first and foremost is the student seeking those skills—skills they can bring with them wherever their career journey takes them.