Micro-Credentials as an Institutional Response to Labour Market Transformation: Universities and the Shift Toward Flexible Learning

Abstract

Skills are losing economic value faster than the multi-year university degree can renew them. Employers expect 39% of core skills to change by 2030, and the pressure is heaviest in economies that cannot replenish their workforce demographically. Both the European Union and, more recently, the Republic of Moldova have promoted micro-credentials as the institutional response to this pressure. Whether universities can actually function in that role, however, depends on conditions that the literature has not yet examined in detail, particularly for a small EU-candidate economy. The present paper builds a conceptual framework that combines human-capital theory, signalling theory and institutional isomorphism, and applies it through a comparative documentary analysis of European policy instruments, the legislation of Ireland and Estonia, and the Moldovan legal architecture. We argue that micro-credentials act on human capital through three functions (replacement, unbundling and augmentation), and that each of them depends on the same enabling condition: a trusted institutional guarantor, dedicated public funding for the start-up phase, and full integration into the qualifications framework. Ireland and Estonia satisfied this condition by different legal routes and their universities reached scale. Moldova has built an equivalent legal framework but channels provision through adult education without placing universities at the centre, and take-up has remained low. The binding constraint is institutional rather than legal, and the paper draws concrete policy implications from this finding for the Moldovan higher-education system. UDC: [378.14+374.7]:331.5; JEL: I23, J24, I28