MyAxelos – Building credibility with digital badges

But why is investing in digital badges an important part of demonstrating your credibility in the jobs market?

Here, Peter Janzow of Credly – leading digital credential service provider – explains why this matters:

How do you remain relevant as a professional when the world has never moved so fast?

In technology, the product cycle today is either a continuous release process or something that lasts between three and six weeks. With such speed of change – plus the shift in employer/employee relationships and growth in hybrid job roles – you need to stay current and prove it too. But how?

Since 2014, with the beginning of the open badge movement – comprising a digital format to represent and verify professional qualifications and learning achievement – the digital badge has become the established “source of truth”, especially in technology.

Before that, individuals didn’t have control over their own credentials, having to return to original certification providers to request transcripts and creating a lot of friction in the process.

By 2018, more than 15m digital learning credentials have been issued, defining what a learner does, what they know, who backs their claim, how they’ve been assessed and what steps they’ve achieved to be certified. And this de-facto language of qualifications today has advanced further, with real-time verification and even more granular skills information available.

IBM, a fellow early advocate for digital badges, advocates for changing the way organizations “develop and take inventory of skills” using a new credential structure that is:

• Timely
• Verifiable
• Portable
• Discoverable
• Differentiating

The company’s adoption of digital badges – which meet all of the above criteria – has increased employee skills, certifications, engagement and employability across the organization, among other benefits. Results, according to IBM, “exceeded” their “wildest expectations”.

And learners can decide how and where they share this information – a vital right in the age of data protection.

Taking control of your career

Previously, a lot of training and accreditation was left undocumented and telling your “professional story” coherently was inefficient.

The advent of digital badges has allowed employees to take over the process of keeping themselves skilled and employable, plus the evidence to back the claims they make.

Ultimately, these digital certifications are helping people to get jobs and progress in their careers. Our surveys show that learners feel a much higher degree of confidence in being able to present their story and demonstrate they are better qualified than another candidate.

And this approach is now moving into industries adjacent to technology: EY identified the seven skills domains moving so quickly its staff needed to keep up with and, consequently, implemented skills training and certification based on digital credentials. This concept is now spreading through professional services, finance, banking and healthcare.

For employees, digital badges mean your qualifications are going to live on your mobile device: you can show your badge to your interviewer in real time, who can verify it and carry on with the interview, exploring your fit for the role.

This movement allows people to be more connected in their professional career development and helps them to stand out. And with it contains the motivation to keep yourself learning and avoid falling behind as things change faster than you can imagine.

This shows why AXELOS’ decision to make digital badges a key element of the My AXELOS subscription service for ITIL^®, PRINCE2^® and MSP^® professionals is so valuable to practitioners.

Best practices are changing faster than ever before and it’s incumbent for practitioners to achieve currency via certification, remain current with CPD and be recognized for this via digital badges.

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