I understand the appeal of starting with content. At a university, we are surrounded by people who know fascinating things. A faculty member has an idea. A leader sees an opportunity. An existing course looks like it could become a microcredential with a little editing.
There is energy in those conversations. I want that energy, but before we approve another offering, we owe the prospective learner a more useful conversation: What are you trying to do that you cannot do well enough today?
That question changes the work. It asks us to understand a person’s responsibilities and the circumstances in which learning will have to prove useful. It also makes some attractive course ideas harder to defend. I am increasingly comfortable with that.
At UPCEA Convergence, Rebecca Federspiel of Scrum Alliance and I shared what our organizations have learned while developing healthcare-focused microcredentials together. One of the most useful parts of that discussion was acknowledging how easily institutional enthusiasm can get ahead of learner need. We brought expertise and good intentions to this work. Neither relieved us of the responsibility to ask whom we were serving.
Start with a Person You Can Recognize
“Healthcare professionals” sounds like an audience. For design purposes, it leaves an awful lot unanswered. Consider a clinician being asked to help evaluate an AI tool and a manager responsible for improving coordination across a care team. Both work in healthcare. Their decisions, prior knowledge and opportunities to apply new learning may differ significantly. A course can be relevant to the industry and still miss the person.
In our partnership, we worked through roles, experience, credentials, professional challenges and prerequisites before deciding how an offering should address those needs. That discipline helped guide courses in areas including responsible AI, healthcare data and team dynamics.
A useful exercise from our conference handout is the anonymity check. Remove the audience label from a proposed credential. Can someone still recognize the intended learner from the needs and problems described? If the description could fit almost anyone, we probably have more listening to do. “Improve leadership skills” gives a designer very little to work with. Helping someone resolve competing priorities across a healthcare team gives us a situation we can actually design around.
Then comes my favorite check: What happens on Monday morning? After completing this credential, what decision will the learner make differently? What will they be able to handle that previously required help? “Understand agile principles” does not tell me enough. “Use a structured conversation to help a team decide which improvement to tackle first” gives us something to teach and assess. It also gives the learner a reason to care.
Good Intentions Need Evidence
This is where the conversation can become uncomfortable, especially when an offering has an enthusiastic champion. Faculty members or industry experts should not stop bringing us ideas. Their judgment matters. Sometimes they recognize an emerging need before market research clearly shows it, but enthusiasm should lead to an inquiry. Who else experiences this problem? How urgently? What are they doing about it now? Our workshop materials include a passion project filter for precisely this reason. An idea deserves examination even when someone influential loves it.
Learner interviews, employer conversations, audience surveys and feedback from existing offerings can help us distinguish a plausible need from a demonstrated one. We should also listen for inconvenient answers. People may value a topic without wanting a credential in it. They may need a narrower skill, a different format or support that a course cannot provide. That is useful information before development begins.
The same scrutiny belongs in the business case. Our intake materials ask who the learner is, what has changed in their responsibilities, what they should be able to demonstrate and how success will be measured. Those questions help keep the eventual syllabus connected to the reason for building it.
The Learner’s Calendar Is Part of the Curriculum
Even a well-chosen topic can become an impractical learning experience. Imagine asking a working professional to complete a short credential that requires long, uninterrupted study periods—or requiring repeated live attendance without first understanding shift patterns. We may describe the offering as flexible while leaving the learner to absorb every scheduling difficulty.
Designing around learners means examining those barriers early. Format, pacing and prerequisites all affect whether someone can benefit from the learning. So does the assessment: if we promise a capability, learners need a credible opportunity to demonstrate it in a relevant situation. A short course still makes a claim on someone’s time. We should be able to explain why each part belongs there.
Agility Includes Changing our own Plans
Our partnership also gave us the humbling reminder that developing courses about agility does not automatically make the development process agile. We had to learn each other’s processes and tools. We experimented with approaches, including skipping storyboards, and took on four courses at once. In retrospect, that scope stretched us. Development took longer than we anticipated, even as the collaboration strengthened the work.
That experience belongs in the discussion as much as the finished offerings do. Teams need permission to reconsider their scope when they discover what delivery requires. Otherwise, the launch plan can become another assumption nobody is willing to question.
Begin with an offering small enough to learn from. Decide what evidence would justify expanding it. Give someone responsibility for reviewing learner feedback and making changes. A first launch should help an institution learn how to serve its audience better; it should not commit the team to multiplying an untested approach.
The Next Conversation
For leaders considering their next microcredential, I would start with one idea already moving through development. Sit down with the team and describe a specific learner facing a specific problem, then explain what that person should be able to do after completing the offering and how you know it matters to them.
Notice where the explanation becomes vague. That is where the next conversation with learners belongs. There will still be room for the faculty member’s expertise and the leader’s ambition. They will have a clearer purpose, and the person giving us their time will be more likely to walk into work on Monday ready to use what they learned.