What are digital badges?
Digital badges are verifiable, portable credentials that represent a learner’s skills, achievements, and knowledge.
Who issues digital badges?
Digital badges can be issued by educational institutions, professional organizations, and companies.
How do we know that a digital badge really belongs to a particular individual? Is it safe and secure?
Digital badges are published in a way that the end viewer, such as an employer, can immediately verify that the badge was actually issued to a particular learner from a particular organization, making them more valuable to the learner than a traditional written claim on a resume about a professional development activity.
Each digital badge includes metadata and unique identifiers that link it to a particular individual who earned it and to a particular organization who issued it. This information is hosted in a secure place outside of the learner’s control, which makes it tamper-proof and verifiable. The learner, on the other hand, does have control over deciding whether, how, and with whom to share the badge.
How do learners benefit from digital badges?
- Digital badges showcase an individual’s skills and achievements in a way that is easily understandable and verifiable by employers.
- Digital badges help job seekers stand out in a competitive job market by providing evidence of their abilities.
- Digital badges are portable and shareable across various platforms, including LinkedIn, personal websites, and digital resumes, which allows learners to share their skills with a broad audience, including recruiters and hiring managers.
- Digital badges provide opportunities for professional sharing, personal branding, and networking on professional social networking sites, such as LinkedIn. Building and maintaining a robust network can lead to new job opportunities, partnerships, and collaborations. Meanwhile, cultivating a strong personal brand through profile updates and shared content leads to a profile that acts as an online resume, which increases visibility to recruiters and potential employers.
- The pursuit of digital badges can encourage learners to engage in lifelong learning and continuous skill development, which is crucial in today’s rapidly evolving job market.
- Digital badges can lead to promotions, new job offers, and career shifts by highlighting specialized skills and competencies that may not be evident from traditional qualifications alone.
How do employers benefit from digital badges?
- Digital badges offer a reliable method for employers to verify candidates’ skills, including the ability to easily and immediately verify that the named institution issued the named badge to this particular learner. Because each digital badge is linked to metadata that details the earning criteria, digital badges provide transparency about what the badge holder knows and can do.
- Digital badges give the awarding institution control over the descriptive language and visual branding of how badges appear to viewers, including exactly how the badge appears on platforms like LinkedIn.
- Digital badges offer details about earning criteria and earner’s skills in plain language, that is more easily understandable to an audience outside academia.
- Digital badges allow employers to streamline the hiring process by quickly identifying candidates who possess the specific skills and competencies needed for the job, reducing time and costs associated with screening and interviewing.
- Employee digital badges help employers easily understand their existing workforce capabilities so they can target training and development initiatives more strategically to fill gaps.
- Promoting digital badging for employees fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement, while demonstrating a commitment to employee professional development.
Credit to UW-Madison Division of Continuing Studies Digital Badging