Finding ways to support individuals with barriers to employment can be challenging. Badges can be a useful tool for employment support professionals when supporting their users to re-engage with the process of getting work, helping to break negative internal dialogues and overcome problems with confidence for individuals embarking on, or returning to, an employment journey.

Badges can be used to support individuals to tell the story of their learning and experience and demonstrate work readiness, and can even be joined together to create pathways of activity that lead to opportunities within specific businesses or sectors.

The key to badging well in an employment support context is to equip individuals with the confidence to say what they are good at, helping with motivation to keep going and continue taking steps to a better future.

Issuing badges for employment support is a great way to recognise and reward the development of vital employability skills to help recipients build confidence and take positive steps in activities such as:

• CV creation
• Cover letter writing
• Interview skills development
• Employer networking e.g. careers fairs
• Receiving coaching and mentoring

When writing badges for employment support, it makes a huge difference if the recipient has a relationship with the organisation that is issuing the badge, but most importantly, believes what it says about them. Consider not only how an employment support badge demonstrates work readiness, but what engaging with the process says about an individual.

This badge works as an example of rewarding achievements related to employability skills that can be overwhelming, or act as a barrier to an individual’s participation in the recruitment process. Its alignment with the RSA Badge Standard provides an avenue for a recipient to learn about their achievement in a broader context and how they might progress these skills in future endeavours. Other frameworks could also be incorporated here, such as the Skills Builder Universal Framework, depending on the employability support provider’s internal assessment criteria and communication of this with individuals.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of activities that are important for employability development, such as completing applications or attending one-to-one sessions.

Want to use this badge? Click the link for an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the badge data, ready to be copied and customised.

To use an exemplar badge and make it your own:

1. Download the spreadsheet and customise to your needs.
2. On your digital badge issuing platform of choice, create a new badge and input the badge data from the spreadsheet.
3. Edit and adapt the data to suit your needs.
4. Publish the badge / make it available for issuing.

While all badges that follow the Open Badge Standard will contain the same core components, different issuing platforms can label and format them differently and often have different approaches to applying settings and attributes to a badge.

Don’t panic – the excel file contains all the information you’ll need to build the badge on your chosen issuing platform (full list of Open Badge platforms) and come readily formatted with instructions for three popular issuing platforms: Open Badge Factory, Navigatr, and Credly.

Consider these badges as templates – it is always recommended to ensure your badges are adapted to your needs and tailored to be relevant to your recipients. This will ensure that your badge is meaningful and valued by those you issue it to.

Examples of customising an exemplar badge to fit your needs could include:

• Expanding on the information to add specific detail about an activity you will issue the badge for.
• Adjusting language to suit your organisation’s brand.
• Adding a location.
• Removing any elements you feel are not relevant to your badge recipients.

The platform examples provided in our exemplar badges are intended to help illustrate how a set of badge data may require adjusting to fit the issuing platform being used. Which badging platform you choose will depend on the on your individual use case and the functionality you require. The Digital Badging Commission does not endorse any particular badging platform. A full list of Open Badge platforms is maintained by 1EdTech.

If you represent an Open Badge platform and would like to be included in our exemplar files, please provide us with an excel sheet containing our exemplar data mapped to your system and we will add you to the download files.