2 days ago
More Workers Are Getting Job-Skill Certificates. They Often Don't Pay Off.
More Americans are turning to a booming market for skills credentials—from digital-marketing certificates to online courses in artificial intelligence—to bolster their résumés. Yet most programs deliver few material returns, a new study finds.
These certificates, digital badges and other nondegree credentials have proliferated as more academic institutions and other providers spot a lucrative business. Workers, though, have few tools to assess which of data-vars-anchor-text="thousands of options">thousands of options are worth their time and money. Employers, too, often struggle with what to value.
Many credentials don't provide a pay boost or lead to a career transition, said Matt Sigelman, president of Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit that analyzed the outcomes for more than 23,000 of the most popular certifications and other credentials. It found that just one in eight nondegree credentials delivered notable pay gains within a year of completion.
Using a data set of 65 million American workers and their career histories since 2009, the study compared workers who received a credential with similar workers who didn't get one—then measured the difference in their pay gains and career movements a year later. Burning Glass's online tool lets people search for and assess each of the credentials it analyzed.
Even some certificates from elite institutions—and for skills in demand—provided little immediate payoff, according to the analysis, which Burning Glass Institute conducted with the center-right think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
A Project Management Graduate Certificate from Harvard Extension School, for instance, costs $13,760 and takes an average of 18 months to complete online, according to Harvard's website. Of workers who earned the certificate, the share that advanced in their field was only slightly higher than for similar workers who didn't get the certificate—a difference of about 3.7 percentage points, Burning Glass found. Recipients also generally didn't see pay improve any more than they otherwise would have.
Credentials that count
The credentials with the best outcomes made a difference: Workers who received one of the 2,000 top-performing credentials earned about $5,000 extra a year, on average, within 12 months of completing the programs. Many of the certificates were in nursing, radiology and other medical fields—where credentials are widely valued by employers and labor is consistently in demand.
The options are vast, and growing. More than 700,000 different nondegree credentials were available in the U.S. in 2022, according to a report from nonprofit Credential Engine. The number of short-term certificates that workers collected rose by a third between 2013 and 2023, according to Burning Glass.
'There's no single recipe' for a worthwhile credential, Sigelman said. In general, nondegree courses help workers acquire new skills and demonstrate their learning to employers, he said, rather than offering a golden ticket to a new career.
And not every credential-seeker is after an immediate pay raise or career transition. Some workers say they get them because employers pay the cost and the credentials could come in handy in the future.
How to assess
Sigelman recommends workers considering a credential read job postings and identify the in-demand skill set for their desired positions—whether that is project management, data analysis or social-media marketing.
Gabriel Sanchez, 38 years old, enrolled in the University of Colorado, Boulder's Cybersecurity Certificate—designed to teach the basics of protecting computer systems—in 2023 to switch from a career in higher education to one in the tech industry.
He estimates two or three of his roughly two dozen classmates have landed jobs in the field, based on the group text chain they kept up since completing the course in March 2024. The successful few include Sanchez, who said he emphasized his soft skills and the technical vocabulary he learned from the course in his interviews—rather than expecting employers to be impressed by the credential.
The Burning Glass study found that workers completing the Boulder cybersecurity course were about 9 percentage points more likely to switch into the field within a year than similar workers without the certificate. They were about 6 points more likely to move up to a better job in the same field. The university said it discontinued the course last December, after its contract with the third-party course provider ended.
'The name of the certificate doesn't carry any weight the way a master's degree or even industry certifications do,' Sanchez said. 'I knew that this was more to build a set of skills that I can put on a résumé.'
To Sigelman, that is the right mindset. 'Credentials can be a very effective way of not only acquiring skills, but validating that you have them,' he said.
He thinks many credentials with poorer outcomes were developed without sufficient industry feedback.
'A lot of credentials are being designed based on a loose understanding of what it takes for somebody to get hired in the field,' Sigelman said.
Write to Haley Zimmerman at
