There are plenty of reasons why people who are well past school-leaving age take third-level courses, says Dr Ciara Staunton, pointing to those she delivers in the area of forensic psychology.
“One course I run is eight weeks long and always full because there are always people fascinated with crime,” she says. “It has nothing to do with their work. It has nothing to do with anything. It’s purely they love a podcast, a TV programme, and the course is a step up from that.”
Staunton also runs a diploma course, a two-year part-time programme, but in this case she says every student who takes it “is a professional working in criminal justice or one of the allied services and they’re doing this for professional purposes because it’s part of their remit”.
“So there are all sorts of seasons for participating in lifelong learning,” she says. “People who want to upskill and reskill, people who have moved into a management space but don’t have the qualification or who never went to college but have always had that hankering.”
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Staunton is the project director at the national Recognition of Prior Learning in higher education project and is working on an assessment of a recently completed five-year programme intended to enable would-be students to have more account taken of their work or life experience when applying for or participating in courses.
The range of that experience can be broad and individuals and institutions alike have traditionally struggled to quantify or properly value it.
Sometimes, she suggests, people take a course in what is very much their own area of expertise for the formal qualification or the self-confidence it offers.
Fashion consultant and events organiser Fiona Hayes is an example of this.
Self-employment, she says, “can be a very lonely place and I don’t know whether this is endemic among women in their 40s, which is a really tricky stage, but I’ve certainly found myself questioning my ability at times”.
The public side of her work, Hayes says, for a long time included a regular slot on daytime TV, which might seem anything but solitary. Yet, she adds, much of the daily routine is far more insular and studying at the University of Limerick (UL) has been has been hugely beneficial personally and professionally.
On the face it, opting to do a professional diploma in public relations and communications might be taken for studying what she already knew, but Hayes says the experience has been “completely transformative for me, really life-affirming”.
“Originally the decision was partly to do with the fact I’d never got a degree and so I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder, but I didn’t know whether I’d be able to negotiate a master’s but it’s been an eye-opener,” she says.
“The course is delivered in a way that takes account of the fact most people are working, there is flexibility around the delivery of assignments and the network of people I’ve connected with is really worthwhile. And the content is very relevant to me, I’m already applying things I’m learning to my work, thinking more strategically about the things that I do.”
Hayes, who is progressing towards the master’s by way of shorter diploma courses, was one of the speakers at UL’s recent Transforming Higher Education conference, which also heard the story of Diego Silva, a Brazilian with a background in engineering who was working until recently as a night porter while getting the Irish qualifications required to resume his professional career.
These, say people involved in the sector, are the sorts stories that are going to get more common as lifelong learning becomes intertwined with career evolution.
A greater need for people to retrain seems inevitable given the scale of change coming to many workplaces.
A UN-backed report published this month suggests up to 40 per cent of global jobs will be affected by technological change, most obviously artificial intelligence, in the coming years, with 33 per cent of roles in countries such as Ireland said to be exposed to automation.
The scale of it all has prompted an array of educational initiatives intended to facilitate upskilling and reskilling through shorter and more flexibly structured courses, with a view to recognising experience and, in some cases, offering significant funding to help with fees.
However, the proportion of people involved remains relatively modest. The numbers aged over 24 starting a full degree course in recent years have declined significantly, with the scale of the demands involved seen as off-putting by many.
Similar figures for postgraduate courses jumped by more than 20 per cent to nearly 40,000 during the Covid-19 pandemic, and have remained high since.
There has also been a growing emphasis on shorter, specialised courses packaged as building blocks to more prestigious qualifications. What once might have been a certificate course is now a micro-credential, or “microcred”, a key part of a developing strategy to facilitate largely career-related learning.
There are about 500 course options in colleges involved in the Irish Universities Association’s microcreds.ie initiative, many of them in the business and technology areas but with far more options around the country.
Student feedback tends to be very positive, although the cost, at anything between €250 and €2,000, can be pretty substantial.
“A very high volume are employer-sponsored,” says Orla Bannon, head of careers and development at Trinity College Dublin, where more than 1,000 people have completed microcreds in recent years.
“Employers are encouraging people to do the courses in the way they have always encouraged people to do, say, aMBA. Microcredentials are now included in a lot of those portfolios, which is great.”
More needs to be done, employer representatives say, and help is needed to pay for it.
“There has been a huge investment by employers into the National Training Fund and it’s at times like these we should see that investment coming back through into the workforce,” says Maeve McElwee, executive director of employer relations at Ibec.
“AI is going to have a huge impact over the next two to three years, it isn’t five to 10 years away, it’s much closer. This is the time now that we should be looking at how we can upskill and reskill, both in the traditional skills and also in AI literacy.”
