Dr Patrina Law, Digital Badging Commission, provides an introduction to Digital Badges and their current use across the UK.

If you have used LinkedIn recently, then you have most likely already seen skills and achievements endorsed in the form of certificates, and you may have also issued licenses or certifications yourself. By endorsing the ‘skills’ of colleagues and friends on platforms like LinkedIn, you are giving them something which recognises their competencies and achievements gained outside of formal education, that will help them further their career.

This is also, in effect, what a digital badge symbolises – a digital representation of people’s skills and accomplishments. Learning does not stop when we leave school or college, so it naturally follows that we should have a means of recognising and displaying the ongoing achievements and skills we have gained across our careers.

Learning does not stop when we leave school or college, so it naturally follows that we should have a means of recognising and displaying the ongoing achievements and skills we have gained across our careers.

Digital badges are designed to be visually identifiable and digitally verifiable, displaying the key accomplishment and issuer, and containing within, a description of what the person did to earn the badge, plus associated benchmarks and endorsements.

How did digital badges emerge?

Given the changing landscape of work and education across the globe, digital badges have rapidly and organically emerged as a new form of skills recognition. Digital badges were first introduced by the Mozilla Foundation in 2011 as a way to recognise learning wherever it happened, they have since propagated throughout most education sectors (reference).

Technological developments have allowed digital learning, and digital badges, to proliferate, opening up countless benefits to individuals, institutions and employers. In 2022, 1EdTech issued an international ‘badge count’ and estimated that over half a million badges were available to earn, and nearly 75 million badges had been issued to date at the time (reference).

Where are we now?

Digital badges are now internationally recognised as a key format through which skills, learning and experiences are represented and shared with prospective employers and learning institutions. However, in the UK at least, this has emerged as an unregulated endeavour.

The large number of badges available to earn worldwide, coupled with this lack of regulation, has caused a ‘wild west’ of badges to materialise that represent widely varying quality, value and credibility.

The large number of badges available to earn worldwide, coupled with this lack of regulation, has caused a ‘wild west’ of badges to materialise that represent widely varying quality, value and credibility.

The UK, despite being a technological pioneer in many respects, has been relatively slow in adopting digital badges as a mainstream tool for skills validation, with a range of factors contributing to this lag:

1. The education and workforce sectors continue to rely on established, paper-based qualifications and assessments when it comes to delivering and recognising educational attainment. Coupled with a maze of qualification pathways offered at ages 16 and 18 by multiple awarding bodies, delivering overlapping qualifications, it’s no wonder that digital badges are not widely understood by employers. This complexity has supported a cultural and awareness gap whereby employers and learners – when they do encounter digital badges – are not familiar with their benefits, and so harbour concerns over their credibility and value when compared with traditional qualifications.
2. Whilst excellent frameworks exist to underpin essential life and work skills, unlike other countries, the UK lacks a comprehensive national framework for digital badges, leading to inconsistencies in their creation and recognition.
3. The digital divide has created a disparity among learners and employers with regards to access to technology to effectively earn and manage digital badges. For smaller organisations and training providers, digital badge issuing can also be an expensive activity, with budget constraints and the perceived complexity of implementing new systems, further contributing to a lack of change.

Despite pockets of successful deployment by employers, educational institutions and city-based programmes, these stand out the core reasons why the UK remains behind the curve in harnessing the potential of digital badges. Which is why the RSA and Ufi VocTech Trust, have launched the Digital Badging Commission, to learn from these pockets of innovation and other fully-fledged international programmes and ultimately, to transform how individuals, employers, and organisations recognise and reward learning and skills development in the UK.

The Digital Badging Commission

At the core of the Commission’s work is the aim to build a movement towards greater understanding, development, and adoption of digital badges by accrediting bodies, policymakers, and employers, fostering a more holistic view of the skills we gain across our lives and careers.

The commissioners themselves represent employers, the recruitment sector, technical pioneers, higher and further education and independent awarding bodies. In addition, the Commission is engaging with more than 50 stakeholder groups and conducting extensive international research, drawing on global nationally-governed skills banks and badging ecosystems, and case studies from the UK’s education sectors and the RSA’s Cities of Learning programme. It will also be exploring contemporary skills frameworks for the regulation of badges, helping to increase trust and adoption by employers, and enabling learners to manage their badges via digital skills wallets.

Digital badges are already in widespread use providing a flexible and dynamic means to reflect the skills that people are acquiring in education and the workplace. What we need now is to catch up and make the most of their potential, helping the UK to meet the demands of a changing skills landscape.

What we need now is to catch up and make the most of their potential, helping the UK to meet the demands of a changing skills landscape.

With the convening strength and dedication of the Digital Badging Commission to turn world-leading ideas into world-changing actions for good, we have an opportunity to enable learners, trainers and employers to thrive, supported by a system that recognises and rewards lifelong learning.