Providing Online Training? Here’s Why You Should Think About Offering Micro-Certifications

Collecting certifications is one of the best ways for professionals to communicate their proficiency in a certain skill without even having a conversation about it.

LinkedIn profiles, resumes, and even business websites that depend on the brands of the members of top management depend on the accolades and qualifications of the person of interest.

While accolades are collected with time and experience, a certificate is one of the best ways to prove that one is qualified in using a specific skill.

As a result, many online courses today are offering certifications. Besides being beneficial to the learners, certifications have almost become a mandate to sell premium courses. In fact, the popularity of certifications is so high that almost every online course, including many free ones, are offering certifications.

So, you could say that offering certifications is a learning and development industry trend that is reaching a saturation point. What was once a point of distinction is now just another feature that is probably also offered by one of your competitors.

So how do you set yourself apart? The answer is micro-certifications.

What Are Micro-Certifications?

As the name suggests, micro-certifications are smaller, more focused certifications that act as proof that a person is proficient at a certain skill.

For instance, a certification in content marketing is a micro-certification as compared to certification in organic digital marketing that will cover a variety of skills.

Micro-certifications are especially popular among IT professionals who like that they can spend a small amount of time and effort and get certified for a specific skill. Now that we have understood micro-certifications, let’s see how they can be used to benefit your online program:

Make Smaller Sales

If you break down your certificate course into smaller modules, each with its own micro-certifications, you will not have to ask your customers (learners) to commit to a longer learning journey or the (relatively) large sum of sale amount.

This will drastically reduce the amount of consideration that goes into making the purchase decision.

At the same time, you will essentially still be selling the same course and potentially making more sales.

Sell Micro-Certification Bundles

Another way to use micro-certifications to improve sales numbers is to offer them in bundles.

Let’s understand this with a quick example. Let’s say you have six modules that you can convert into micro-certifications. As mentioned earlier, this will allow users to pick and choose the micro-certifications that they want to undertake.

Now, let’s say you have a set of three micro-certifications that cover 50% of your full course curriculum. If someone purchases these three micro-certifications, you make more money as compared to selling one micro-certification. 

So, to incentivize such a purchase, you can offer a discount (on the price of a single micro-certification) to those who purchase three micro-certifications.

The best way to utilize this strategy is to not create fixed bundles. Simply program an automatic discount whenever a prospect adds three micro-certifications to their ‘cart’.

Ability To Conduct Experiments

Let’s say you are thinking about creating a new course. However, in order to ensure that your audience is actually interested in learning what you will teach in the said course, you will have to build the entire course and try to sell it to a prospect to get market feedback, right?

Not with micro-certifications. With these, you can simply break down your new certificate idea into different micro-certifications and build and launch just one of them to your audience. This way, you can gauge the market response to understand whether or not it is worth your time and effort to build an entire course around the subject.

If you are using an LMS like Trainual, you can even easily start sharing your new micro-certification course with your existing audience.

Conclusion

These were just a few of the many, many benefits that course creators can enjoy with micro-certifications.

Have you used micro-certifications in the past? If so, how was your experience? If not, what’s stopping you?

Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.