June 2, 2023
The Micro-Credential Rush: How Adults Are Relearning Careers in 90-Minute Chunks
A logistics manager in his forties told me he earned three separate certificates last year, none longer than a weekend, and none of them replaced the two years he once assumed a career pivot would take. He is not an outlier. He is the new normal. Adult learning quietly stopped looking like night school and started looking like a subscription habit. The friction driving this shift is specific and unglamorous: careers are changing faster than any traditional credentialing calendar can keep up with, and adults with mortgages and children do not have two years to spend finding out whether a
