According to an IBM study, 87% of all badge earners feel more engaged with a digital badge program. Open Badges benefit the earner and the issuer by helping them understand which employees have accomplished what skills. They solve many problems, such as making it easier for employers to identify and hire potential candidates and retain their skilled employees. These badges or certificates represent proof that an individual has completed a specific task or achieved some skill. And now, they are gaining wider adoption across the world. Let’s understand what Open Badges are and how they can benefit earners and issuers.
What are Open Badges?
Open Badges are digital badges that verify individuals’ skills, achievements, and interests issued by credible organizations. These badges are embedded with metadata regarding the skills and achievements attained. They are represented with an image or digital certificate with the recipient, issuer, metadata, and other supporting information. As Open Badges are portable and verifiable, they can be displayed in CVs and shared via social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. They help learners get recognition for their achievements by the issuing authority and among their social networks that can bring them better career opportunities. Open Badges consist of the following components:
Earners are the individuals (learners or employees) who have learned a skill or achieved something, and their names are embedded in the Open Badge.Issuer: The organizations issuing the Open Badge to recognize the skills and achievements of learners or employees are issuers.Metadata: They are the skills, interests, or achievements attained for which the issuer issues the Open Badge to the earners. It may include an official certification for a course, soft skills like presentation or collaboration, and hard skills like programming language proficiency.
How can Open Badges help students and employees?
There are several reasons Open Badges are becoming increasingly popular. They can help students, employees, or professionals showcase their skills and knowledge to potential employers and institutions. Let’s find out why Open Badges are beneficial.
Display earned skills and achievements.
Open Badges represent that an individual has gained a specific skill that anyone can see and recognize. Students and employees can earn badges and prove their skills and achievements. Open Badges are task-oriented, demonstrating that you have already accomplished a task to boost the employer’s confidence in hiring you.
Motivates employees to upskill
Employees must regularly upskill themselves to learn new things and be updated with recent development in their professional work. It also helps them become more competent and not easily replaceable. But not everyone is motivated from the inside to learn new skills and develop themselves. Hence, providing badges to them can help them motivate as they may perceive it as an additional benefit besides learning. It can prove that they have gained a skill that they can utilize for their personal development or benefit their present or future organizations. And once they have earned one badge, they may crave for another. This way, they can keep on upskilling themselves while providing more value to their organizations.
Portable to showcase anywhere
Students starting with their professional careers can earn Open Badges that are portable and sharable with potential employers. They can also share it on their networks like LinkedIn, where employers may find them. You can also display it on your resume or CVs to prove your skills. In addition, these badges are accessible on various devices and recognized by institutions across the globe.
Career opportunities
Open Badges are easily verifiable, secure, and immutable. So, when you share your badge with employers, they can quickly verify whether it’s genuine or not. It increases your credibility and gives you an upper hand in the selection process. As a result, you can land great career opportunities if you are a student and even if you are an employee looking forward to better opportunities.
Provide recognition
When you earn an Open Badge for your skills and accomplishments, you can highlight it on your social channels. It will help you get more recognition in your organizational or professional network. And if you are an independent business owner or a freelancer, you can promote your brand more. It will bring you more clients and customers and increase their trust in you. So, if you are a business that wants to create and issue digital certificates or Open Badges, here are some of the tools for you.
Sertifier
Send digital badges and certificates easily to your employees and learners via Sertifier, a digital credential management software. Whether you are a university, institution, school, academic, organization, or industry, use a badge and certificate tool to create certificates easily and save your time. Expand your brand’s online presence by sharing beautiful and errorless certificates and rewards on social media. You can instantly share the certificate link to download via Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, etc. In addition, integrate it with third-party tools and LMS that you use to extend its functionality. Sertifier also offers an API so that you can add custom integrations as well. You will get privacy features like access control, identity control, security auditing, secure data storage, real-time monitoring, and more. It offers premium white labeling to strengthen your brand image and online visibility with branded badges and certificates. Additionally, you can customize your certificates as you want by adding site domain, metadata, navigation links, and more. Get professional templates, a skill library, overview, audience reports, badge automation, and more for free.
SimpleCert
Highlight your employees’ or learners’ efforts and acknowledge their positive behavior with SimpleCert. It helps you create eye-catching and beautiful certificates for your whole team, league, or school by its bulk certificate capabilities. You can build a certificate template and design and fill it with personalized information automatically for bulk certificates. Make your certificate the way you want in minutes by using tools like drag-and-drop, padding, tables, boxes, rows, columns, etc. Using pre-built certificate templates will also help save you time as you don’t have to create each one from scratch. It works well on Windows PC or Apple Mac devices without any special configurations or settings. Just sign up, and you are ready to go. You can store your certificates and allow users to see all the credentials they achieved through its secure portal. Upload your list, connect to an API, add each user one by one, and allow SimpleCert to generate and email the certificate to the user automatically without downloading to any location. You will also get the option of downloading each certificate after generating it in a PDF format so that you can directly give it to your employees or students in their hands. SimpleCert also supports many languages for creating certificates. Start making your certificate at $19/month and receive 150 credits, a social sharing option, a recipient portal, and more. Take a free trial and dig deeper.
Accredible
Accredible is one of the most secure and powerful digital certificate makers. It is extraordinary when it comes to delivery methods, design options, security, verification, analytics, and social sharing. You can easily share certificates on social media platforms like LinkedIn to generate more web traffic and referrals for the program. Accredible is dynamic and smart in terms of automatic name change handling, retroactive editing that makes management easy, and automatic renewals or expiration. Show credibility in your certificates with a single click verification, and know your certificates are secure with their blockchain logging and bank-level encryption. Get pre-made templates to design your certificate and build custom certificates as per your idea by using a simple drag and drop editor. Do not worry about a small mistake that can cost you money and time; Accredible makes automated corrections for you. Turn your certificates into the source of referrals that will act as a marketing tool for your certificate program. Your students or employee can print high-quality certificates from anywhere. In addition, it will support multiple languages, detailed analytics, automatic screen sizing, and more. Try digital certificates and badges in your programs for free and get API access. Go with the Lite plan at $960/year to get more features and benefits.
Openbadges.me
Use digital credentials and badges to recognize achievement with Openbadges.me. Organizations like education, training, skills, and more use Openbadges.me to send certificates to the users. It is a secure, easy-to-use, and versatile platform that provides you with the certificates you need to create and share with the earners. Send certificates to recognize qualifications, motivate small steps, improve skills, and more. Use modern certificate techniques to replace or supplement paper certificates and improve audibility and security. It also helps you enhance your organization’s reputation by showcasing your offerings through social media. While organizing an event, Openbadges.me helps you issue certificates instantly without any error. You can also use its plug-ins and advanced APIs to integrate with your existing tools seamlessly. Start with the starter plan for free or choose a paid plan from $50/month and take an easy path of creating badges and certificates.
Badgr
Build your won digital badging program with Badgr, a platform with shareable learner records and stackable learning pathways. It helps you create skills-based programs to connect more learners and reward them by recognizing their achievements with secure and portable digital credentials. Analyze, expand, visualize, and learn from your community with Badgr’s pathways functionality. A learner can also share the digital credentials on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Let your learners earn a digital certificate that is secure, verifiable, and rich in information about your learner’s achievement. You will also get everything from sophisticated integrations, analytics, best practices to security and other useful features. Get it started for free or request a quote for Badgr Pro.
Open Badge Factory
Get an innovative, cost-efficient, and user-friendly online platform – Open Badge Factory – to create Open Badges, issue in the name of the student or employee, and manage. You will get all the essential functions you need to create certificates with a premium level of strategy. Recognize your learners and reward them with high-quality open badges that can help them showcase their skills and add value to their profession. It is suitable for every kind of organization, company, and association. The tool comes with valuable features to help you build meaningful badges or certificates. Open Badge Factory offers a companion service – Open Badge Passport – a free online platform where learners can receive badges and store them safely. It also allows learners to share it on social media as they like and apply for new badges advertised by thousands of organizations. Open Badge Passport is also available as a mobile app. It offers a free trial where you will get a maximum of 2 badges to create, 5000 badges to issue every year, and standard features. If you have small needs, you can get some more useful functionalities with the least paid plan.
Credly
Gain insights into your workforce, supercharge profiles, and issue digital badges with the help of Credly. It claims to be the world’s most extensive digital credential network that lets you create digital certificates and badges. It helps you contribute to the earners’ career success that drives demand for your training and enhances your development program’s revenue. Make sure your employee never misses any achievement reward to create a good working environment and build confidence inside them. Earners can also attract employers with verified certificates. Save money and time by switching from paperwork to digital and bring value to the members connected with you for relevant career opportunities. Credly offers the best functionality and features that help organizations meet their goals. Credly brings everything from technology to expertise so that you can build a successful program.
BadgeCert
Say tata to paperwork and embrace a modern digital certificate system with online badge creator, BadgeCert. It helps you control creating, issuing, storing, and sharing badges. You can also help the earners prove their skills, accomplishments, experiences, contributions, and credentials through your badges. BadgeCert badges and certificates are 100% secure and verifiable; you can record digital badges and certificates on Blockchain to add more layers of security and verification. You will also get analytics tools and real-time data, and support for various languages across the globe. Furthermore, BadgeCert’s API helps you to integrate with CRM and LMS platforms. Earners will benefit from a cloud-based portfolio and the ability to share their achievements on employer databases, career sites, online resumes, email signatures, and social networks. In addition, BadgeCert serves many industries, including associations, training providers, universities, corporations, non-profits, etc. Join a live demo to know the working of BadgeCert in a better way. To start issuing badges and certificates today, you can connect with a BadgeCert specialist and discuss your goals, budget, etc.
Conclusion 👇
Offering a digital certificate for an individual’s effort, hard work, and dedication towards accomplishing a task or gaining a skill is itself rewarding. It encourages them to learn more, engages them with your organization, and benefits individuals in their career expansion and landing better opportunities. Thus, choose a digital certificate maker platform from the above list and reward your students or employees that they can cherish. You may also be interested in Moodle hosting for your Learning Platform. 9 Comprehensive student engagement platforms to offer world class learning.
