[Music] [Brian Johnsrud] Welcome, everyone. I'm really excited to be here to speak with you on this exciting and really important topic today. How to Upskill for Today's Job Market with Digital Credentials.
In 2021, Adobe was asked to join the World Economic Forum's new Global Collaboration for Education, which they called the Education 4.0 Initiative. And we joined along with 40 other global leaders in education across industry, nonprofits, and governments. And the charter still remains today for our group to co-develop frameworks and policy recommendations to really ensure that our education systems are preparing students and early career seekers for the jobs of the future, while also helping the global labor market meet their rapidly evolving needs for the workforce.
A key reason that Adobe was part of the World Economic Forum's Education 4.0 initiative is because for many years, creative thinking has been found in their global research across industries to be the number one most in-demand skill that's increasing in importance to employers. However, the problem is hiring managers are still really struggling to find candidates, whether for full-time roles or as freelancers who are creative thinkers, creative problem solvers, and who can communicate ideas in different ways and using different media, because those skills don't typically show up in traditional job application materials such as resumes, cover letters, or college transcripts.
In the past decade, we've also seen this rapid proliferation of digital credentials as ways to demonstrate that an individual has competency or proficiency in specific job tasks and skills. So you've probably seen a whole world of credentials and micro-credentials and certificates out there. It's a rapidly evolving ecosystem but in general, credential types vary between these sorts of shorter micro-credentials all the way to really robust professional certifications. And they can be issued in ways such as digital badges, sometimes using providers like Credly, sometimes you'll receive a digital certificate, and there are often sorts of links or data to really describe the full set of skills earned and how they were validated or verified.
However, they don't show up in traditional job applications usually, unless the candidate is first aware of how important these are and that they take the time to do so by either listing them in their resumes or their portfolios, or actually kind of posting them in places like LinkedIn.
To really understand what this need for creative jobs looks like and this ecosystem of micro-credentials, Adobe partnered with Edelman Research to really try to understand this landscape where creative and digital skills are more important than ever, we wanted to know how can this growing digital credential ecosystem really best support students, job seekers, and employers to match up with the right talented. So Edelman surveyed 1500 hiring managers and 2250 college students and career seekers across the US, UK, and India. And they sampled from across nine different large fields, from IT, to manufacturing, to healthcare, and business. And then to get more in-depth insights, they also interviewed hiring managers, as well as 20 campus leaders in the US whose job is to really drive credentialing or certification initiatives on their campuses.
This study, which we call the Creative Edge, really helped reveal which skills that both hiring managers and career seekers, which include college students, are viewed as most important today. And the results show this interesting general alignment between these two groups on what the top in-demand skills are, and those look like digital document creation and organization, followed by visual and multimedia communication and multimedia content creation. However, you might notice here on this chart that the career seekers in general tend to underestimate the importance of these skills to hiring manager kind of across the board, by around 10% or less. They're viewing them as important, but not quite realizing how important they are to hiring managers.
And the hiring managers in the study shared that the real need for employees with these skills, especially creative problem-solving, stems from this rapid evolution of new ways of communicating digitally. Spurred on in part, we heard from participants by remote work during the COVID pandemic, as well as a number of them, noting unprecedented challenges such as this industry deception we're seeing being driven by AI, but also other large global factors like climate risk, geopolitical tensions, and in general, the rapid digitization of workflows and the workforce itself. All of those factors are pushing these creative skills to be really top priority.
One interviewee in the study articulated exactly how they define these skills and the value they bring. And this was a theme we heard kind of across the board. This particular hiring manager in financial services, I think, just captured it really eloquently. They say creative problem-solving is the ability to think differently about a problem and generate new solutions. And these visual design skills mean that the creator can put written language and pictures together in a way that is clear and focused for the audience. So when you think about it at this level, it's probably not surprising that really any job, any industry, any company or organization, they want to see people like this. They want those creative problem solvers. And today, everyone needs some basic level of visual design skills to tell stories using images, multimedia, and text, regardless of what their job is. But the manager in this study shared their real challenges in actually identifying these specific skills based on the traditional job applications, resumes, and degrees that are put in front of them. And similarly, job candidates shared with us that they are also facing difficulties and how they can effectively showcase these essential skills. So to bridge this divide, these non-degree or alternative credentials have really emerged as the number one way to support those entering into the job market by offering this ecosystem of certifications, micro-credentials or digital badges to really help candidates stand out in those specific areas.
Now, traditional college degrees have long been the gold standard for signaling subject matter proficiency and helping elevate talent. And while they continue to be an important consideration in any hiring decision, other factors beyond degrees and transcripts are rising in importance, especially when it comes to these kinds of skills. So, unsurprisingly, if you look at the table here, relevant real-world experience on the far left and then examples of past work, the next two bars after that, such as portfolios, are ranking as the highest two signals for demonstrating these skills, both for hiring managers and career seekers. But just after those, right in the middle of that chart is professional certifications. Those are ranked third by most hiring managers and career seekers who say that those are effectively helping demonstrate these skills. High school diplomas rank fourth, and bachelor's or post-grad degrees rank fifth. Now, again, this is not to say that high school and college degrees are not important, of course, but the content of what is learned and the way in which it gets translated to employers via things like the title of your degree or occasionally transcripts that lifts courses they aren't as helpful in pointing out, can this person do visual communication? Can this person be a creative problem solver? In fact, the vast majority of hiring managers in this study say they're now willing to hire candidates without a university degree. In the US, 86%, in the UK, 74%, and in India, 60% said they're willing to hire candidates without a degree. But non-degree or alternative credentials are valuable not only for those without a degree, they're also helping give degree holders a competitive edge by indicating that these essential skills, not visible on a transcript or portfolio, are really there. So, in short, these credentials are acting as this powerful signal booster, breaking through this noise of a really competitive job market to match the best people for specific jobs.
K–12 schools, of course, can prepare students to be career-ready at graduation by integrating things like professional certifications. And we've seen this at Adobe for the past 17 years in programs like our Adobe-Certified Professional program, with almost 2 million people now having or 2 million of those exams having been passed largely by K–12 or primary and secondary students.
Because all of the ways that digital credentials can signal essential skills and lifelong learning potential, hiring managers, we found, are looking for them more than ever. Not only do they make it easier to assess talent, hiring managers also shared that employees with credentials bring additional value to their business or company, including cost-effectiveness and training, reskilling or upskilling, because what we've seen is industries are spending a massive amount of resources to skill, upskill, and reskill their current or new talent. And so what these allow, what these micro-credentials allow is employers to see a new generation of new hires and new talent who won't have as significant a burden of skilling because they're already showing up to the job with those new in-demand skills.
When the researchers asked hiring managers exactly what value credentials and creativity bring to their organization, 81% said that the credential format makes it easier for them to assess if candidates had those skills. 80% said that they're cost-effective in helping them outsource that skill development, which otherwise would have been on-the-job training. And the fifth number on this slide, I think is in one of the most powerful and interesting, in the bottom right, that 74% of hiring managers also agree that candidates with creative skills deserve higher compensation, which is in part then setting those candidates on trajectories for larger economic opportunities over the span of their careers. So in short, what we're seeing is when a job application with a digital credential to validate their skills lands in their inbox, hiring managers are viewing that candidate as someone who's high quality, someone who's willing to go the extra mile, and in many cases deserves to be compensated accordingly.
One unexpected finding from the Creative Edge report was the degree to which hiring managers see these self-efficacy skills that are reflected in candidates who have obtained a digital credential.
So with a rapidly changing world, 44% of all workers core skills are expected to change in the next five years. Now just think about that, 44%. Almost half of the skills that we need today are going to change in the next five years. So even if our education systems are 100% prepared to make sure that students are skilled up and job ready for their first job, 44% of the skills that they learned are now going to change in just five years. So this is why workforce upskilling and reskilling programs are growing so rapidly and are one of the key other initiatives from the World Economic Forum, because these costs to employers for this professional development are also rising. That's why it's so important that over half of hiring managers in the survey and in our interviews shared that a candidate with a credential stands out as someone who is already self-motivated for professional development. This is someone who's willing to learn, who sees new skills on the horizon and can quickly upskill and grab them.
Similarly, if we return to that World Economic Forum jobs report, in the list of top five skills rising in importance, the two highlighted here relate to this theme of self-efficacy that employers are looking for curiosity and lifelong learning, that's ranked number four, and resilience, flexibility and agility, that's ranked number five. So that's why this was a not surprising but slightly unexpected finding in this research, that the presence of micro-credentials themselves, regardless of their topic, signal candidates to hiring managers who are curious, who are lifelong learners and are resilient.
As one hiring manager shared in this quote, certifications show me that they knew exactly what they wanted to do. And we value hard work, dedication, and someone who's aspiring for something. That can come across in an interview especially well when they have multiple credentials. This is a hiring manager in the US in the software industry.
So there are lots of stakeholders involved in this ecosystem that we've been discussing, employers, career seekers, K–12, higher education, but I think higher education and campuses are really the one sector in education today who are taking micro-credentials more seriously than ever and alternative credentials. In part, again, with the rise of AI, we know campuses and universities are not overnight going to have courses in AI literacy or minors or whole majors. And in fact, it might not even make sense to have an entire course or a minor in something like AI literacy. Instead like digital literacy, it sort of needs to be embedded in every course, so that regardless of whatever their subject matter is or their discipline, major or majors with college degrees are able to show, I can understand my subject area, I can do the skills within my discipline or industry, and of course, I know how to use AI to do it as efficiently and productively and as high quality as possible.
So how do campuses fit into this, into this equation, to bridge this divide between the student career seekers and employers? As I've said, many campuses have been deeply investing in credential ecosystems for years, sometimes working with external providers, sometimes building their own in-house credentials, and often partnering with industry to provide exact industry, career-relevant credentials for students. And so, unsurprisingly, those are also the campuses who often have some of the highest job placements for students in their local, state, or national jobs to match their skill level. And those are the initiatives that are probably the most exciting to me, where you take a region or a state or a county, and they're deeply committed to students and alternative education learners having economic opportunities where they are, especially for those who need to stay local, for their community, for their family or other commitments. They want to make sure that there are great jobs and great opportunities and skills education to help maintain the vibrancy of their own communities.
But in terms of coursework, at the time of this study, only 15% of the higher education institutions that we surveyed reported having courses that focused on developing these essential skills. Not an entire course just on these skills, but traditional courses that are making sure that these skills are present. So those aren't going to show up on a transcript anyway. And this is why 76% of hiring managers have been exploring new ways of evaluation such as digital credentials. And they are really looking to partner with campuses who they know want to get their students jobs, to help equip them with those. And like with any initiative that wants to have a real impact, it turns out partnerships are key to solving this equation. When researchers asked hiring managers which institutions they trust the most when their name is attached to a credential, the top four were actually pretty neck and neck, starting with higher education institutions like colleges or campuses, second being professional bodies or industry associations. The third, right after that, 81%, is exam boards or certification partners and providers such as Pearson Certiport. And then write neck and neck with that, technology companies like Adobe. Now ranked last but still really high, is online-only technology companies. So that's, for instance, like LinkedIn Learning. But notably, that lower ranking is only if they stand alone. If those providers like LinkedIn Learning or Skillshare or Coursera offer courses in partnership with a college or with a professional association or with a technology company, then the credibility of those courses and credential authors is transferred over. So of course, the most powerful impact comes when these five are working together, where, for instance, a campus partners with industry leaders, certification issuers or other associations to put the most value in these certifications and to make that value the most visible to employers by including as many names as possible.
So with all of this incredible research and insights, what is Adobe doing to help make sure that hiring managers, career seekers and students are really skilled up and able to show those skills to land great jobs? Because together is better, Adobe for over 15 years, has been partnering with industry and credential providers and schools to help equip students with really meaningful credentials, to help them build that creative confidence and then land their dream jobs. Most recently for college students, Adobe has launched a new series of 12 micro-credential courses. We call these the Adobe Creative Skills series. And these free courses really focus on the most in-demand career skills that are often not taught in an entire college course, such as Presentation Design, Generative AI for creativity, social media, content creation, and event marketing. So we know these are really important. They're showing up in so many job postings as bullets and requirements, and how many jobs in some way require you to give presentations, for instance? But what's often not taught is what makes a really effective presentation design, both in the storytelling and in the visuals, to make sure that when you're communicating with your audience, it really lands. That's the kind of content that's covered in these one to three-hours short courses. There's also a dedicated course just on job application essentials, which we also run often with campuses as student webinars in partnership with offices like career service. And these really give students advice on what are the latest hiring trends and how they can make sure that the content and design of their resumes, cover letters, portfolios and their credentials really stand out to employers.
And last but certainly not least, almost two million certifications have been given by Adobe Certified Professional exams, which are largely used by K–12 and higher ed students to really dive deep into an industry skill, paired with an Adobe tool to let employers know that these students and those who have passed these exams are really ready to do this kind of creative work. They are, as I've mentioned, industry-standard recognitions. And they really let students show that in a live proctored exam, they can perform those key digital, creative, and communication tasks across a variety of jobs. One of the things we're most excited about is for years we've had exams in the Creative Cloud flagship apps. But as of this past summer, we, for the first time have our first Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat Adobe Certified Professional exams. The Express Exam, the first subject area is content marketing and content creation, which is so important for so many jobs, including individual dedicated jobs just for content creators. And the Acrobat Pro Exam focuses on document management and document creation, again, a really important skill, as this research showed, across jobs and across industries.
So these certifications, courses and micro-credentials are also being integrated in really exciting ways into K–12 and college courses and programming for students, really making sure that these creative districts and creative campuses are enabling their students to stay on the cutting edge.
So, in summary, this research is really exciting for us because it shows us a path forward, continuing to partner with educational institutions and credential industry leaders to build creative confidence in students and set them up for success in a wide variety of careers. Meanwhile, also helping industries thrive and adapt to this evolving world where new hires who are not only skilled up, but who are curious, flexible, and lifelong learners are there for them and ready to adapt for the future. So to learn more about these different micro-credentials and courses, you can see links on the bottom of the slide. For the micro-credentials, you can visit Adobe.ly/courses, and for professional certifications, certifiedprofessional.adobe.com Thank you all so much for learning with me and allowing me to share some of these exciting new research insights and programs with you. I hope you enjoy the rest of MAX.
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