Alternative credentials are no longer an experiment at the margins of higher education, but building a true alternative credentials business model is a different challenge entirely. Noncredit certificates, badges, bootcamps, and other short-form credentials have become part of the program portfolio at many colleges and universities.
Research from UPCEA points to an important gap between offering alternative credentials and building the institutional capacity to manage them strategically. In its Alternative Credentials: Business and Program Models study, UPCEA found widespread adoption among surveyed institutions, particularly those involved in professional, continuing, and online education. Yet 20% of respondents reported that alternative credentials were not a key component of their institution’s strategic plan, even when senior leadership embraced them (UPCEA, 2024a).
Perhaps even more telling, 71% of respondents did not know the gross revenue generated by alternative credentials at their institution (UPCEA, 2024b).
That finding points to a larger challenge. Institutions may be successfully launching individual credentials without having the structures in place to understand their collective performance, make informed investment decisions, or manage them as a portfolio. In other words, offering alternative credentials is not the same as having a sustainable credential business model.
The Challenge Is Bigger Than Designing a Credential
It is tempting to think of alternative credential development primarily as an academic exercise:
Identify a workforce need. Develop the curriculum. Set a price. Market the program. Enroll learners.
Those activities matter, but they represent only part of the work.
As alternative credentials multiply, institutions must make decisions about who has authority to create them, how opportunities are evaluated, how programs are funded and priced, which technologies support them, how credentials relate to existing academic programs, how employer partnerships are managed, and how performance is measured across the portfolio.
UPCEA’s findings suggest that these functions remain highly decentralized at many institutions. The association identified inconsistent processes for establishing, funding, and pricing alternative credentials and found that institutions with alternative credentials incorporated into their strategic plans were more likely to have resources available for program development (UPCEA, 2024a).
This changes the question institutional leaders should be asking.
Instead of only asking, “What credential should we launch?”, institutions also need to ask:
“What operating model will allow us to develop, deliver, evaluate, and sustain credentials repeatedly?”
What Does a Sustainable Credential Business Model Require?
There is no single business model that will work for every institution. UPCEA’s research found considerable variation in how institutions structure and price alternative credentials, with more experienced institutions demonstrating greater pricing variability (UPCEA, 2024a).
That makes institutional context important.
A sustainable model should connect several components that are often managed separately.
Strategic Alignment
Credential development should begin with institutional priorities rather than with a technology platform or an isolated program idea.
Institutions need to determine what role alternative credentials are intended to play. That may include workforce development, adult learner enrollment, employer engagement, community impact, new revenue, pathways into degree programs, or some combination of these objectives.
This alignment matters because credential programs rarely exist independently of the rest of the institution. They draw on faculty expertise, administrative resources, technology infrastructure, marketing capacity, industry relationships, and institutional reputation.
The question is not just whether an institution can develop a credential. It is whether that credential advances something the institution has decided matters.
Market Alignment
Short-form credentials are most useful when there is a clearly defined learner or workforce need.
Market analysis should help institutions identify the competencies learners need, the audiences they intend to serve, and the alternatives already available to those learners. Research on microcredentials has similarly emphasized the importance of validated market analysis and alignment with labor-market demand (Hultquist & Murphy, 2025).
Employer engagement can be particularly useful here. Industry partners can help institutions identify emerging skill requirements, validate competencies, and understand where existing educational pathways may not be meeting workforce needs.
That input should inform program decisions rather than replace them. Labor-market demand is one consideration within a broader institutional strategy.
Governance
As credential portfolios grow, institutions need clear credential governance – clear answers to questions of ownership and authority.
- Who can propose a credential?
- Who determines whether it carries academic credit?
- Who approves it?
- Who establishes standards for quality?
- Who owns the relationship with an employer or industry partner?
- Who reviews pricing?
- Who determines whether a credential can stack into another program?
- Who decides when a program should be revised or discontinued?
These questions can become particularly complicated when alternative credentials cross traditional organizational boundaries. Continuing education, academic departments, workforce development, enrollment management, finance, marketing, information technology, registrars, and external partners may all have a role.
Without clear credential portfolio management, growth can produce a collection of individual credentials rather than a coordinated institutional portfolio.
Financial Structure
Pricing is important, but pricing alone does not constitute a business model.
Institutions also need to understand development costs, instructional costs, technology expenses, marketing and recruitment costs, administrative overhead, revenue-sharing arrangements, expected enrollment, and the resources required to maintain the program over time.
The fact that 71% of respondents in UPCEA’s research could not identify gross alternative-credential revenue at their institution illustrates the difficulty of understanding performance when credentials are distributed across different units and financial structures (UPCEA, 2024b).
A sustainable model therefore requires more than setting an attractive tuition price. Institutions need sufficient financial visibility to understand what programs cost, what they generate, and whether continued investment supports institutional objectives.
Technology Infrastructure
The credential itself sits within a larger technology ecosystem.
Depending on the program model, institutions may need systems supporting registration, payment, learning delivery, assessment, credential issuance, learner records, customer relationship management, employer reporting, analytics, and communication.
The challenge is not only selecting the right individual platforms.
Institutions need to consider how learners, administrators, instructors, employers, information, and transactions move across the ecosystem. A learning management system may deliver instruction, for example, while another platform manages registration and payment, another issues digital credentials, and institutional systems maintain official learner information.
Adding technologies without considering how those systems and processes work together can merely transfer organizational fragmentation into the technology environment.
For institutions planning to scale professional and continuing education, technology architecture therefore becomes part of the credential business model rather than a downstream purchasing decision.
Pricing Should Follow the Business Model – Not Define It
One of the most practical questions institutions face is developing a microcredential pricing strategy – how to price professional certificates and other short-form credentials.
Benchmarking competitors is useful, but it is not enough.
A $2,000 certificate offered directly to individual learners through open enrollment operates differently from a customized employer-sponsored cohort. A stackable credential designed to lead into a graduate program may have a different financial purpose from a standalone executive education offering.
Pricing therefore needs to reflect the role of the credential within the larger business model.
Institutions should consider direct and indirect delivery costs, the intended learner or purchaser, comparable offerings, employer willingness to pay where applicable, expected enrollment, revenue-sharing arrangements, and the credential’s relationship to other institutional programs.
UPCEA’s finding that more experienced institutions demonstrate greater variability in pricing is particularly important. It suggests that mature credential portfolios may move away from a single pricing formula toward models adapted to different markets and program purposes (UPCEA, 2024a).
The objective should not be only to determine what the market will tolerate. It should be to understand what financial structure supports the purpose and continued delivery of the program.
Employer Partnerships Can Be Part of the Model
Employer partnerships in higher education can extend well beyond validating curriculum.
Institutions may develop employer-sponsored cohorts, customized workforce programs, contract training, or credentials created collaboratively with industry partners. These relationships can create direct pathways between institutional expertise and workforce needs while giving employers a role in identifying the skills and competencies that matter in their environments.
But employer involvement should not automatically be treated as proof of credential value.
Research on employer perceptions of alternative credentials has shown that employer awareness and use continue to evolve and that employers may view these credentials as supplements to traditional credentials rather than universal substitutes for degrees (Gallagher, 2018).
That makes the quality of the partnership (and clarity about what a credential represents) more important than merely attaching an employer’s name to a program.
Strong partnerships require clear roles, expectations, governance, and measures of success. They also need to make sense for both the institution and the industry partner.
From Program Development to Institutional Implementation
Designing the credential business model is only part of the challenge.
The institution then has to make it work.
A new credential model may affect academic departments, continuing education units, registrars, finance teams, marketing departments, information technology, faculty, instructional designers, enrollment teams, and external partners. New technologies may need to be implemented. Existing workflows may need to change. Responsibilities may move between units. New processes for approving, developing, marketing, evaluating, and retiring programs may need to become routine.
This is where credential strategy becomes an implementation initiative.
A process can be well designed on paper and still fail to become the way an institution actually works. A technology platform can be configured correctly without being integrated effectively into institutional operations. A partnership strategy can exist without anyone having clear responsibility for managing those relationships.
Implementation therefore requires attention to the interconnected elements of the initiative: strategy, governance, processes, technology, roles, communication, stakeholder engagement, and organizational adoption.
Change implementation methodologies can provide additional structure when significant changes in behavior or ways of working are required. For example, the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) distinguishes between installation – putting a new system, process, or structure in place, and implementation, when people consistently work in the new way and the organization realizes the intended results. AIM emphasizes factors such as leadership sponsorship, readiness, reinforcement, and observable behavior change (Implementation Management Associates Worldwide, 2026).
Applied to alternative credentials, that distinction can be useful.
Creating a credential approval process is installation. Having departments consistently use it is implementation.
Purchasing and configuring a credentialing platform is installation. Integrating it into the institution’s workflows and having people use it as intended is implementation.
Creating an employer partnership strategy is installation. Having clearly assigned people consistently develop, manage, evaluate, and renew those relationships is implementation.
Not every credential initiative requires the same implementation methodology. But every institution moving from isolated programs toward a coordinated credential portfolio needs to think beyond program design and consider how the new model will actually operate.
Building a Credential Portfolio That Can Evolve
Alternative credentials are developing within a larger shift toward skills-based education and workforce pathways. The U.S. Departments of Education and Labor have emphasized the need for more interoperable approaches to credentials and skills so learners and employers can better understand how education connects to workforce opportunities (U.S. Department of Education, 2025).
That environment will continue to change.
New technologies will emerge. Employer needs will shift. Some credentials will grow; others will need to be redesigned or retired. New partnerships and delivery models will create opportunities that institutions cannot predict today.
For that reason, a sustainable credential strategy may not be a fixed model at all.
It is an institutional capability: a repeatable way to evaluate opportunities, make decisions, mobilize resources, develop programs, implement them, measure results, and adapt.
For colleges and universities, the strategic opportunity is therefore larger than the creation of microcredentials.
It is the opportunity to build a professional and continuing education ecosystem capable of responding to changing learner, workforce, and institutional needs.
Ready to Build the Infrastructure Behind Your Credential Strategy?
Launching an alternative credential is one thing. Building the institutional infrastructure to develop, deliver, manage, and scale a portfolio of programs is another.
ATTECS works with colleges, universities, and industry partners to move professional and continuing education initiatives from strategy into operation.
We help institutions design the business and operating model, establish governance and workflows, build employer and industry partnerships, and design and implement the technology and learning ecosystems needed to support delivery at scale.
That work can begin at different points.
An institution may have identified a workforce opportunity but not yet know what program or partnership model makes sense. It may already have successful credentials but lack a consistent institution-wide process for developing and managing them. Or it may be ready to expand professional and continuing education but have technology, governance, and operational structures that were designed primarily around traditional academic programs.
ATTECS helps connect those pieces.
The goal is not only to launch another credential. It is to build the structures, systems, partnerships, and internal capacity that allow the institution to continue developing programs as learner, workforce, and institutional needs change.
References
Gallagher, S. R. (2018). Employer demand shaping the future of microcredential market: Insights from a national survey. UPCEA Unbound. https://unbound.upcea.edu/innovation/alternative-credentialing/microdegrees/national-survey-suggests-that-employers-will-lead-way-on-digital-badging/
Hultquist, K. D., & Murphy, S. M. (2025). How microcredentials are revolutionizing the higher-education business model (Issue Brief). Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED676208
Implementation Management Associates Worldwide. (2026). What is AIM? The Accelerating Implementation Methodology. https://imaworldwide.com/what-is-aim/
UPCEA. (2024a). Alternative credentials: Business and program models. https://upcea.edu/alternative-credentials-business-and-program-models/
UPCEA. (2024b, January 8). New research: UPCEA reveals key findings on alternative credentials. https://upcea.edu/new-research-upcea-reveals-key-findings-on-alternative-credentials/
U.S. Department of Education. (2025, July 22). Partnering with the Department of Labor to create a national skills currency. https://www.ed.gov/about/homeroom-blog/partnering-department-of-labor-create-national-skills-currency
