Entry-level and functional skills are essential foundations required for many job roles.  Badges can demonstrate a learner’s commitment to growth in ways that qualification certificates do not capture, highlighting additional capabilities and promoting a lifelong learning mindset.

Accompanying the delivery of entry level and functional skills education with digital badges provides the opportunity to turn everyday classroom and practical activities into opportunities for measurable growth and recognition. They not only help students track their progress but also empower them with a portable record of their skills that they can share with prospective employers or education providers.

Teachers and other “on the ground” staff are vital in this space through their proximity to students. Rather than be limited to a formal framework or rigorous assessment method to identify which students have achieved something, badges can give teachers and other staff the power to reward a job well done in a process as simple as asking themselves “has this student earnt the badge?”

Issuing badges that recognise learner engagement is a great way to mark the development or application of combining multiple skills during participation in classroom and course-related activities. Examples include:

• Consistent attendance
• Tasks and exercises
• Collaborating on group work
• Sharing and presenting

When badging as a complement to formal learning or qualifications, it helps to recognise positive attitudes to learning and engagement with practical activities. This provides an opportunity to celebrate markers of progress that do not rely solely on academic performance and can be earned whether the individual goes on to gain the final qualification or not.

This badge works as an example of a way to build on classroom activities that can be applicable to working life, but does not rely on the result of an exam or test. Its alignment to the Skills Builder Universal Framework provides an avenue for a recipient to learn more about skills in a broader context while celebrating the step they have taken.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of entry level and functional skills that reward positive learner behaviour while demonstrating their suitability to everyday tasks.

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.