The Value of Non-traditional Credentials in the Labor Market

This study investigates the labor market value of credentials obtained from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and shared on business networking platforms. We conducted a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners, primarily from developing countries and without college degrees, who completed technology or business-related courses on the Coursera platform between September 2022 and March 2023. The intervention targeted learners who had recently completed their courses, encouraging them to share their credentials and simplifying the sharing process. One year after the intervention, we collected data from LinkedIn profiles of approximately 40,000 experimental subjects. We find that the intervention leads to an increase of 17 percentage points for credential sharing. Further, learners in the treatment group were 6\% more likely to report new employment within a year, with an 8\% increase in jobs related to their certificates. This effect was more pronounced among LinkedIn users with lower baseline employability. Across the entire sample, the treated group received a higher number of certificate views, indicating an increased interest in their profiles. These results suggest that facilitating credential sharing and reminding learners of the value of skill signaling can yield significant gains. When the experiment is viewed as an encouragement design for credential sharing, we can estimate the local average treatment effect (LATE) of credential sharing (that is, the impact of credential sharing on the workers induced to share by the intervention) for the outcome of getting a job. The LATE estimates are imprecise but large in magnitude; they suggest that credential sharing more than doubles the baseline probability of getting a new job in scope for the credential.