As states and now the feds put more money behind short-term credentials, a looming question is whether employers put stock in them.

Jeran Culina and Amanda Bergson-Shilcock decided to ask. Over a couple months this spring, the two leaders at the National Skills Coalition interviewed 75 small and midsize manufacturing and construction companies about skills-first hiring and how they use nondegree credentials in hiring and promotion. Most companies had between 200 and 600 employees, and they were eager to talk.

“Small businesses face the same challenge as any business—finding skilled workers that match their hiring needs—but their specific voices and needs aren’t often heard,” Bergson-Shilcock, senior fellow at NSC, and Culina, senior manager of the group’s Business Leaders United, told us in a joint response to questions.

Many businesses did some version of skills-first hiring, but they didn’t call it that. 

Small businesses also found the sheer number and variety of nondegree credentials confusing—and very few said they consider them in entry-level hiring. When it came to hiring for technical roles on the next rung up, however, companies were far more familiar with specific credentials and took them into account for both new hires and promotions.

  • The key distinction: Employers didn’t know much about general work-readiness credentials, such as WorkKeys or soft skill certifications. But they knew and trusted many industry-specific credentials, such as certifications for milling and lathe, avionics, or diesel tech.

This bears out in students’ experiences. Researchers at Education Equity Solutions, for example, recently found that while many colleges view short-term credentials as a “foot in the door” in fields like manufacturing, students want them to immediately open the door to a family-sustaining job. Certificates pegged to slightly more advanced technical roles were much more likely to deliver that.

“Businesses told us over and over again that they value clarity,” Culina and Bergson-Shilcock say. “And, of course, workers want the confidence of knowing that the credential they’re earning will have value in the labor market—that employers will care if they see it on their résumé.”

The BLU report recommends policymakers invest in technical assistance that helps businesses make sense of short-term credentials and also scale industry-wide partnerships that make it easier for small employers to connect with colleges and other quality training providers.

“Sometimes the CEO him or herself is doing the hiring,” the researchers say. “Small businesses are hiring a smaller volume of workers compared to their larger peers, so they can’t easily get a training provider to create a class just for them. And they have less time and staff available to sit on workforce boards or otherwise help shape the education and workforce system.”

In that vein, small businesses wanted easier ways to access state and federal dollars for workforce development and more government spending on training, particularly for upskilling incumbent workers. Much of what small employers were concerned about, though, had nothing to do with skills and everything to do with their workers’ day-to-day challenges around childcare, transportation, or even affording appropriate clothes. 

The Kicker: “They viewed employees as people who weren’t just employees but people who had lives outside of work,” the researchers say.