Issuing badges for internal training and CPD is a great way for employers to document essential skills or knowledge within their workforce, while incentivising and rewarding employee development and retention. By using badges in this way, employers can ensure their badges are completely tailored to the training and development their organisation requires or encourages.

If you work for a large corporation with an internal HR department, badging your staff should be easy. However, for SMEs or public sector employers, recognising workforce development may be harder.

Vocational employers or those employing entry-level workers don’t often provide discrete accredited or certified training, instead using on the job training, where line managers show employees how to carry out tasks, or knowledge is passed on from more experienced staff. In these cases, induction processes can be a list of functions that new recruits need to be able to perform independently within a fixed timeframe, without competency being documented. 

Digital badges provide an excellent opportunity to add structure and a more formal documentation of these processes, and enable recognition for activities beyond simply attending a training session. 

Issuing badges to recognise employees that apply training and CPD to their daily work is a great way to document and incentivise development of essential skills and knowledge in areas such as:

• Practical task-based learning
• “Stepping up” in employer initiatives
• Health and safety e.g. fire safety and manual handling
• Human Resources e.g. EDI
• Compliance e.g. GDPR
• Wellbeing and mental health

It is important to find easy ways for employees to evidence that they have applied training in their jobs, or ensure that line managers can quickly verify when an employee has demonstrated competency and issue the badge when it happens.

This badge works as an example of a specific activity in which an employee has had an opportunity to develop with a real example of practice. Its alignment with the RSA Badge Standard provides an avenue for a recipient to learn about their achievement in a broader context and the value of these skills for future endeavours.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of industries and development areas such as those listed above, and becomes a beneficial way for employers of all sizes to track experience and compliance within their workforce.

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.