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Are you familar with digital badges, what they are, how to get them and why they may be valuable to you? Let's explore their potential significance.

Digital badges are icons that indicate a person has successfully demonstrated a certain skill, like emergency preparedness or collaboration. Each badge carries metadata about how and when that skill was learned.��

“Digital badges help students tell their skills story,” says Mary Elizabeth Smith, a learning innovation strategist with ������Ƶ (UOPX). “The badge, with its robust metadata, is a vehicle that students can use to articulate their skills and how they were evidenced.”

A digital badge may have:

• Your name
• Which skill��you attained
• Where you earned the badge
• A URL to the badge itself or a page with all your badges earned from that institution
• Other key details such as the date you earned the full credential and keywords that recruiters might search for

Also known as micro-credentials, these badges can help prove, rather than merely��suggest,��that you have specific, measurable knowledge.

According to��: “[They] offer a simple way to recognize online learning. Think of a digital badge as not only a line on your resumé noting a particular skill or competency, but also visual evidence documenting how that skill was obtained.”

Because they visually tell a person’s skills story, they can boost the credibility of someone’s��personal brand��in a quick and compelling way.

For starters, a certificate denotes that a student has completed an education program or course. A badge doesn’t necessarily refer to a course and appears in a more visually appealing form, geared to help you stand out when employers are skimming your credentials.

A��micro-credential��is a certification of mastery of a skill, multiple skills or a collection of successfully completed courses. This is very similar to a digital badge, and the two terms are often used interchangeably.

Simply put: because employers care.

According to��, companies are increasingly moving toward skills-based hiring. Candidates can always share their skills traditionally via text on a resumé. These badges, in contrast, are an easy-to-skim, searchable way to convey those skills to current and prospective employers alike via social media.

What’s more,�� these don’t waste time. UOPX, for example, enables students to��identify which skills they’ve learned��during their degree programs in real time. Students can then post relevant badges to their online platforms as they achieve them. They don’t have to wait four years for a diploma; they can showcase their skills immediately.

UOPX offers digital badges for its associate, bachelor’s and master’s programs because it saw a gap between what skills employers were looking for and what skills candidates actually had. By researching each industry’s career-relevant skills, aligning UOPX curricula with those skills and then working with the digital credentialing platform����to provide badging, UOPX has upped the skills game within, and for, the workforce.��

Having to sift through so many candidates, hiring managers skim resumés quickly. One way to stand out from the crowd is through these badges.

To this, Smith adds that employers may:

• Feel that badge holders have an enhanced professional identity
• Appreciate the transparency��into��how a candidate’s skills were earned
• Identify who has career-relevant skills within their organization
• Realize the person is invested in remaining up to date in their field
• Determine that a candidate’s skills are aligned with job openings

A digital badge is typically earned through a workshop, training program, course or class. At UOPX, a digital badge can be earned in a matter of weeks or months and after completing an assessment.

“To receive a badge for emergency preparedness [for instance], the student must successfully complete two courses and the aligned assignments. Once the student has met the criteria, they are alerted that the badge is ready for them to claim and then share,” Smith explains.

Since the badges students earn at UOPX are stored in Credly accounts, bearers can send them digitally to current employers or recruiters. They can even print them out as certificates.

You can����in a few easy steps.

To add your badge to another type of resumé, you may need to download the badge as an image file and then copy and paste it to your Microsoft Word document or another app that’s hosting your resumé.

With 4 in 10 American workers worried technology will render their skills obsolete, and with the rise in skills-based hiring, these digital badges are poised to be in high demand.

In fact, people seem to understand this already. UOPX conducted student surveys and focus groups to get a sense of what students needed and found that:

• 76% understand the professional benefit��of these badges
• 64% believe badging will help with advancing their careers
• 75% believe these badges will make it easier to communicate their skills to potential employer
• 81% have a strong desire to complete their program because of badges

Students aren’t the only ones to recognize the potential of these badges. As noted, employers are increasingly aware of��, especially when complemented by a degree.

These badges may be the way of the future.

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