Credentials, Done Right: Why Relevance Is a Regional Question, Not an Individual One
Credentials are proliferating across the education and workforce landscape. Certificates, certifications, badges, and other non-degree credentials are often presented to learners as practical steps toward economic opportunity: earn a credential, build a skill, and move into a better job.
That promise can be real. But it is not automatic.
The evidence increasingly shows that the value of a credential depends on whether it is relevant to the work employers need and recognize. The more important question, however, is who determines whether that relevance exists in the first place.
A learner can choose only among the programs that are available, affordable, accessible, and offered within reach. If the programs a region provides do not map to the jobs its economy supports, the learner absorbs the cost of that disconnect.
Relevance is not simply an individual choice. It is a regional planning outcome.
This is the third post in our series on connecting systems for workforce opportunity. In “The Alignment Gap: Why Regional Talent Pipelines Break, and How to Fix Them”, we examined how disconnected education, workforce, and economic development strategies create talent shortages and missed opportunity. In “The Missing Link: Why Work-Based Learning Only Pays Off When Systems Connect”, we explored why work-based learning must connect institutions, employers, workforce boards, and support providers.
This final article turns to credentials and asks a broader question: How can regions ensure that the credentials they approve, fund, and recommend create meaningful pathways to local opportunity?
The Evidence Is Clear: Relevance Drives Returns
Brookings’ The credential boom is here, but which ones actually help workers? (February 3, 2026), based on an analysis of 156.5 million U.S. resumes by Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Ian Seyal, and Sophia Henn, identifies job relevance as the dividing line between credentials that create value and credentials that add little economic return.
The analysis finds that a first job-relevant non-degree credential is associated with a 3.8 percent wage premium, compared with about 1.8 percent for a first job-irrelevant credential. The difference becomes even more important when workers add additional credentials. Each additional job-relevant credential adds roughly 1.0 percent to wages, while stacking irrelevant credentials produces no additional return.
The distinction is straightforward. A credential concentrated within a specific occupation, such as a JavaScript certification for software developers, can signal skills that employers understand and value. A credential distributed broadly across unrelated occupations may not provide the same signal.
The strongest finding concerns workers without a bachelor’s degree. For this group, a first job-relevant credential is associated with a 6.8 percent wage premium, nearly double the premium for workers who hold a bachelor’s degree. Early-career non-degree workers see roughly a 6 percent wage premium from a first job-relevant credential and more than 2 percent for each additional relevant credential. For experienced workers, the returns from accumulating further credentials are near zero.
These findings carry a clear implication for workforce readiness: credential quality cannot be separated from occupational relevance. A credential must connect to skills, employers, and jobs that exist in the labor market a learner is realistically positioned to enter.
Learners Cannot Choose What Regions Do Not Build
The common response to credential uncertainty is to tell individuals to conduct better research. Learners are encouraged to compare programs, evaluate outcomes, and select credentials connected to in-demand occupations.
Advising matters. Transparency matters. Individual decision-making matters.
But individual responsibility has limits.
An 18-year-old choosing a first program, a displaced worker seeking a new occupation, and a returning adult balancing employment and family responsibilities can select only from the options available to them. Those options are shaped by institutional program portfolios, regional funding priorities, employer participation, transportation, scheduling, and support services.
If a region has not built a credential pathway for a growing local occupation, a learner cannot choose it. If a program exists but is unaffordable, offered only during working hours, or disconnected from employers, access to relevance remains theoretical. If institutions offer credentials without a shared understanding of regional demand, learners may pay in time, tuition, and foregone wages for a pathway that does not lead where they expect.
That is a system problem, not a motivation problem.
New America’s Mapping the Landscape of Degree Apprenticeship (2026) illustrates how unevenly credential-and-work models have been built. The report identified 579 degree apprenticeship opportunities at 346 institutions of higher education across 49 states and the District of Columbia, covering 91 occupations. More than three-quarters of those opportunities are concentrated in five occupational groups.
The finding demonstrates both progress and limitation. Regions and institutions are building integrated education-and-work models, but learners’ choices still depend heavily on what local institutions and employers have chosen to develop.
Relevance Must Be Designed at the Regional Level
A credential becomes more valuable when regional partners build the conditions that make its value visible and durable. That work requires education-to-workforce alignment across several connected functions.
Shared demand data informs program approval
Institutions, workforce development boards, employers, and economic development organizations should work from a common understanding of regional occupations, industries, hiring demand, and emerging skill requirements.
That shared picture should inform new program approval, program review, capacity decisions, and credential investment. It should also be revisited as regional economies change.
Employers validate curriculum and workplace expectations
Employer engagement should extend beyond advisory meetings. Employers can help validate curriculum, clarify occupational competencies, identify appropriate assessments, and create work-based learning opportunities connected to the credential.
The objective is not to make education narrowly responsive to a single employer. It is to ensure that programs reflect broader occupational needs and produce skills that are transferable across a regional labor market.
Workforce boards interpret demand and connect resources
Regional workforce development boards bring labor-market intelligence, employer relationships, public workforce resources, and knowledge of participant barriers. Their role is essential in determining which credentials align with regional priorities and which learners may benefit from them.
Workforce boards can also help connect institutions to employers, public agencies, and funding opportunities so that program design reflects more than institutional capacity alone.
Social service providers remove participation barriers
Relevance cannot produce opportunity if learners cannot participate. Transportation, childcare, benefits navigation, scheduling, and other supports influence whether individuals can enter and complete a credential pathway.
Social service and support providers should therefore be treated as part of workforce readiness infrastructure. Their involvement helps ensure that a well-designed credential is also accessible to the people who need it.
Funding follows shared regional priorities
Braided funding can align institutional resources, workforce investments, economic development support, employer contributions, and philanthropic resources around a common strategy.
The goal is not simply to assemble funding. It is to connect funding decisions to demonstrated regional labor-market value, measurable outcomes, and long-term sustainability.
Credential transparency supports informed choices
Learners deserve clear information about what a credential teaches, which occupations it targets, how employers recognize it, what it costs, and what opportunities it is designed to open.
Transparency should not be limited to marketing language. It should include evidence about employment pathways, occupational connections, and regional demand. Advising can then help learners interpret that information in the context of their goals and circumstances.
Broad Learning Still Matters
A regional relevance framework must also acknowledge an important tension: not every program should be vocational.
Liberal arts and general studies credentials can contribute to citizenship, adaptability, critical thinking, communication, and long-run resilience. Institutions should not be pressured to reduce every educational experience to a single occupation, and faculty should not be blamed for labor-market outcomes that depend on many systems beyond the classroom.
At the same time, the Brookings analysis finds that broadly distributed credentials do not produce the same wage returns as credentials tied to specific occupations. The answer is not to abandon broad programs. It is to make occupational pathways more visible within them and to be honest with learners about what each credential does, and does not, open.
A student pursuing a broad program should be able to understand how coursework, projects, advising, internships, additional credentials, and employer relationships can connect to regional opportunity. That is a responsibility shared by institutions, employers, workforce boards, and advisors.
The issue is not whether every program has a narrow job title attached to it. The issue is whether learners can see the relationship between what they are learning and the opportunities available to them.
Four Commitments for Regional Credential Strategy
For institutions, workforce boards, economic development organizations, and funders, the path forward requires practical commitments:
- Institutions: Tie program approval, review, and resource planning to evidence of regional demand while preserving the broader educational mission.
- Workforce development boards: Provide current labor-market intelligence and help align training investments with occupations that offer meaningful local opportunity.
- Economic development organizations: Integrate talent development into regional growth strategies so that business attraction, expansion, and workforce readiness reinforce one another.
- Funders and public leaders: Direct resources toward credentials with demonstrated occupational value, transparent outcomes, employer validation, and sustainable implementation capacity.
These commitments move responsibility upstream. Instead of asking learners to navigate an opaque credential market alone, regional partners build a clearer and more accountable system around them.
Building Relevance on Purpose
Credentials should create more than completion. They should help learners move toward economic opportunity while strengthening the workforce capacity of the communities they call home.
That requires more than adding programs or encouraging individuals to collect credentials. It requires institutional strategic planning, shared demand data, employer partnership, support services, resource alignment, transparent advising, and sustained regional workforce development.
Morse Strategies, LLC partners with colleges and universities, governing boards and systems, workforce development boards, economic development organizations, and community stakeholders to connect these systems. We support strategic planning, partnership development, sustainable resource mapping and development, education-to-workforce ecosystem alignment, and government relations related to workforce and economic development priorities.
Our role is both strategic and practical: helping partners interpret data, convene stakeholders, align resources, plan the work, and sustain implementation. The objective is measurable progress, not another disconnected initiative.
Relevance should not be left to chance or placed entirely on the shoulders of individual learners. It should be built through coordinated regional planning so that the credentials available to people map to the opportunities available in their communities.
Visit Morse Strategies to learn how we can support your workforce development consulting, workforce readiness, education-to-workforce alignment, or institutional strategic planning efforts. You can also learn more about our approach or start a conversation with our team.