I have written before about how there are fractures in our current education system, globally, and how the skills gap continues to widen as there is misalignment between what students are taught in universities and what companies need and expect. Also, as an association, ISACA constantly raises awareness about the number of open positions in cybersecurity and how companies are struggling to find talent. The reality, however, is that the gap does not only affect a specific role or the cybersecurity field – it’s universal.
Late in 2020, Wiley Education Services, a leading educational publisher, published a study that aimed to delve deep into the skills gap. They surveyed more than 600 professionals in human resource departments, from management to the C-suite. In the research, Wiley found that the hardest skill for a company to fill currently is computer technology, with data analysis, networks and infrastructure, and cloud computing closely following. While kids are growing up these days as digital natives, with tech permeating every aspect of their lives, this does not always translate into digital proficiency. Also, while universities are attempting to introduce more relevant programs in burgeoning fields, there still is not a scalable mechanism for communication between corporations and academia to ensure that supply and demand are aligned.
Associations have always aimed to fill this gap. Professional certifications pick up where degrees stop – training to fill the gaps and testing individuals on skills identified by corporations. Yet, even certifications are sometimes missing the mark, as they tend to evolve too slowly and are often memorization events that happen every few years – rather than a consistent flow of assessed learning. Also, they are difficult to customize, as the demands of an IT professional vary depending on the industry, geography and size of an organization. It’s for this reason, we need to closely pay attention to a fairly new concept in credentialing – stackables.
ISACA’s most recent certifications, ISACA® Information Technology Certified Associate (ITCA™) and Certified in Emerging Technology (CET), are performance-based credentials that were introduced earlier this year as stackables – basically you earn a series of certificates in different related fields and they “stack up” to equal a certification. The concept here is that you may only want one or two certificates in a field to fill certain gaps in your skills, rather than sit for a full exam. The long-term goal is to allow you to customize your credential. For example, if the requirement is to earn five certificates to equal a certification, we would allow you to choose the five from a series of 10 related certificates – essentially customizing your certification to your specific needs – making you more attractive to an industry, a profession or a geography.
Another nice aspect of stackables is that everything is more modular. Later on in your career, you may want to add on a certificate or two to an existing full certification, like our Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) credential. Stackables will allow you to add a certificate in something like cloud audit or auditing AI (Artificial Intelligence) to the CISA, making it even more relevant. The possibilities and permutations are vast. Further, there’s an opportunity to partner with universities to offer these stackable, industry certifications with degree programs, strengthening collaboration with academia.
In the same Wiley study, certificates and certifications were deemed about as valuable as university degrees. In addition to providing paths outside of university with more vocational and skill-based education to high school students, there is a great opportunity for industry and academia to partner to make degrees more beneficial to students and to hiring managers. Modular credentials are one way to do this.
As hiring managers, we need to keep putting pressure on academia to ensure students are better qualified for the jobs we are trying to fill. There is a significant waste of time and money right now as we need to retrain most candidates to complete basic tasks needed to be successful in positions. We also need to push for stronger development of communication and critical thinking skills. This happens through the communication of the industry’s needs, and associations such as ISACA are a perfect vehicle to execute this.
Editor’s note: These new stackable certificates are just one way ISACA is transforming to better serve the industry. Learn more about ISACA’s digital transformation here.