Practical Steps to Effective Credentialing: Lessons from General Assembly

One, thank you so much for joining today's webinar, Practical Steps to Effective Credentialing, Lessons from General Assembly. Now I'm Bianca Woods. I'm a content manager here at ATD. Always so happy to be joining these webinars as a moderator. Now one part of my role here today is to keep a close eye on the chat and keep an eye out for questions that maybe don't get answered in the moment. I'll grab those and save them.

And if we have time at the end of the session, we'll be sure to revisit them. Now I am wanted to start off today by thanking today's sponsor, Instructure. They're an education technology company that's dedicated to elevating the success of all learners, amplifying the power of education, and inspiring everyone to learn together. And their Instructure learning ecosystem supports tens of millions of educators and learners around the world. Now I'm also so pleased to be welcoming today's speakers, Jason Gildner and Heather Luna.

Now Jason is the principal global lead for lifelong learning at Instructure where he works within the center of excellence to bridge product development with thought leadership, marketing, and sales. Sorry about that. And Heather Luna is senior technical product manager at General Assembly, and she leads the development of innovative solutions, leveraging her technical expertise to drive impactful results and address complex challenges. I'm gonna pass it over to Jason and Heather to get things going today. Amazing.

Amazing. Thank you, Bianca. I am gonna go ahead and share my screen, and it's a pleasure to be here today with you all. And what we really wanted to start out with was just to kinda get a sense of where you all are at with regards to your journey with credentialing. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna launch a really quick poll.

We'll give you a few moments to go ahead and respond to that poll. And we just wanna understand exactly where you are with, regards to digital credentials. And I will not sing in the background for you. I know you the the bar was set high with the the the audio that was started at the beginning of this webinar, but, we'll give you just another minute or so. Right.

So we'll give you about maybe ten more seconds here, and then we will share out these results. Alright. Let's see what we got here. So, as you can see on the screen here, a good many of you are just starting out kind of exploring the digital credential world, which is amazing. Glad that you're here.

You're gonna pull a lot from this, I think. You know, it it's interesting that there's not a single one of you that is fully, you know, integrated and leveraging the credentials, for the workplace yet. So, hopefully, by the time we are done talking today, you'll have a better plan in place to at least take the next steps to to be looking into that. So, thank you for the poll. We're gonna keep moving.

So the rise of digital credentials and badging, though those words get used kind of interchangeably. What I really wanted to do was just set the foundation of what digital credentialing kind of is and and how we're seeing the massive growth happen, over time. And so this is a, a wonderful graphic by One EdTech that illustrates kind of the on the left hand side, the number of open badges that were available to be earned in twenty twenty two. And on the right hand side, the actual number, as you can see, seventy four point seven million badges that were actually issued digital credentials that were actually issued in twenty twenty two. So, it it's just grown from there.

We're actually waiting for the next round of this type of graphic to come out. We're really excited about it because we know that the the growth is happening at a rapid rate. So this is just some context for you to see kind of the growth over time. A lot of folks, are not aware of the fact that digital badges have been around for quite a long time, in the market. So what is a digital credential? What are we talking about here? We're talking about things that get called a lot of different things, micro credentials, digital badges, certificates of completion.

There's there's all sorts of different names that people put on this. But when we kind of start to unpack it and we look at what a digital credential is with regards to the open badge standard, which is something that Canvas credentials uses, as their standard. It's built by one EdTech. This makes a digital credential a couple of things, verifiable, stackable, and portable. And we're gonna kind of talk about each of those elements, in further detail as we get going, throughout this webinar.

But just imagine being able to to have validity behind what you're saying that you have, and we'll kind of show some examples of what that means. Stackable is really this word that, you know, maybe you have to earn one or two digital credentials to actually earn a third larger micro credential. So there's just different components and elements of things, with the regards to that. And then portability really speaks to the fact that because it's on the Open Badge standard, you can move it from platform to platform. So if you earn it, you know, at general assembly or if you earn it at, you know, at a an an institutional organization, you can move that badge or digital credential to another digital wallet or another digital framework that's using the Open Badge standard.

It's not locked in behind a wall. So let's keep moving. So if you're not familiar with kind of the ins and outs of a digital credential, there are lots of different metadata pieces that live inside of a badge. A lot of folks that when they when they think about a digital credential, they they think primarily about this image, or some people might even call it a sticker. They think about this image, but, really, the meat behind that image is really what employers and what organizations care about, and that's the metadata.

That's things like the earning criteria. What did that individual have to do to earn that particular credential? Who was it? What what's their email address? All of the data is actually baked inside of this credential. You know, when did they earn it? Does it expire? Do they have to, you know, do a certain, rubric to achieve it? There's all sorts of different elements that you can add, inside of this metadata that really stores valuable information for those employers or anybody that wants to verify that digital credential. So it's not just the image itself. It's actually what's under the hood in the metadata that's really holding the value.

So we'll take a little more, take a look at this in a little bit larger detail here. So if you think about, how this operates, you have an employer, and they act as the issuing body for a digital credential. It goes to the recipient, and that recipient then can take that digital credential and do a variety of things. Typically, what do we see? We see folks earning a digital credential, and then they immediately post it on LinkedIn. Probably all of you have someone in your network on LinkedIn that has shared a digital credential recently, on their network.

Right? And the key to this is that when I go and I look at, digital credential that Heather has just shared, I'm able to click on that credential and immediately verify where she obtained that particular credential from. This is massively important, to the overall kind of validity that we were talking about, that verification on that previous slide that we were talking about versus which this this bottom square or this bottom, shape that you see here, we're self verifying, where someone has, for decades, put on their resume. They have these particular skills. Right? We've all seen resumes. We've all gone through those, those interviewing processes where folks have put skills on their particular resume, and they are self verifying that they know that thing.

That's not to say that every skill that we have will always have a digital credential attached to it, but it certainly does add a little bit more weight to it if you can verify it back. So let's kind of unpack it even more as far as how we are utilizing this. So why does it matter to us? What's the problem? I'm a kind of just give you a a brief scenario, and you can see this graphic, of this kind of heavy equipment here. A friend of mine works in the concrete business, and they were hiring for a front load operator. And so they they went ahead and they did all the interviewing process.

They put out the the job. You know, they had the recruiter. They had the whole nine yards. A gentleman came in with a very shiny resume that, you know, looked good on paper, as we say, and had years and years of experience. So they hired this person, of course.

Several days into the job, they decided to go check, you know, just to check-in on this person. They had them kind of off-site doing some work, some small tasks, things of that nature. And when they went to find this person, the front loader was sideways into a building, and that person was gone forever. So they don't know where that person is. That's a true story.

So this is a situation where employers run into the fact that they are having to kind of take resumes at face value that these folks have these skills. Sure, you can put you can call references, and you can do these different types of verificational checks. But I think we can all agree that if there's a a verifiable piece of evidence backing this claim, it makes it much easier, to kind of go in that route. And it also you know, it just helps to kind of boost your own self advocacy if you have one of these digital credentials. So that kinda goes to the impact.

Right? The next arrow over. What is the impact does that digital credential have, or what does that impact have on you all? Well, now this this concrete company now has to go back out. They have to it costs them money. Right? Because now they have to go back through the hiring process. They have to repost the job.

They have to do all of those types of things that cost time and energy. Whereas if they kind of were to leverage digital credentials or or require that digital credential even maybe, they could potentially save themselves, a potential headache from that perspective. And the opportunity that we are looking at is massive. We know that employees who have the opportunity to upskill and get more skills added to their, to their resume or to their CV, they they are way more apt to stay at that employer longer. And so we're seeing that time and time again.

And I I encourage you to think about the last time you, at your current position, were offered an opportunity to upskill and and how that made you feel when you got that opportunity, to do that. Right? I just got that opportunity a week ago. My my boss came to me and said, hey. I want you to learn Tableau, right, which is a a really cool, powerful tool. And I was super excited because now they're investing time back into me to get more skills added to me.

And so I just want you to kinda think about that. I'd be remissed if we we didn't talk about AI. Right? Because AI is everywhere, and everyone wants to talk about it. IBM just recently did a study. I will not, read you the entire screen, but the gist of it is is that over the next several years, they recognize that they are going to have to reskill forty percent of their workforce because of the change in types of skills that are being replaced by automation or things that are no longer as relevant as they once were.

So all of this to say that there are changes coming with these employers and the and the different gaps and skills that are needed that kind of warrant this discussion, that warrant you all to start thinking really strongly about how you're positioning internal, your internal badging program and what you might want to, accomplish in the next few years. So with that, I'm actually gonna turn it over to Heather, and Heather is going to really start to to talk about how they built out a scalable badging program. Hey. Thanks for having me. I'm gonna get started on the why.

We didn't have a badging solution in place at all at general assembly. What we had was certificates of completion. These certificates of completion live on a home built system. They are not portable. So if a student was to leave general assembly and they misplaced their certificate of completion, they would need to get back in touch with GA.

Someone would then have to go hunt that certificate down in s three and pull, that certificate of completion. So the goal is to transition to a scalable employer recognized badging system with our custom certificates. We are not at the customized certificate stage yet. We are just starting there, but we do have our badging system in place. We did look at a couple vendors, but the neat thing about Canvas credentials is that it does plug in really nicely if Canvas is your learning management system, and I had just completed that migration a couple years ago.

So the two play very nicely together, so that's why we chose Canvas credentials. Very easy to hook the two systems up and apply automation to get those badges out to your learners. So while our learners had certificates of completion, they did not have these cool badges. I have badges, and I am very excited every time I get one. I share it on LinkedIn.

I put it in my email. I am a verified OG with my badges. I like this, and so do our learners. They are so excited about the things that we are deploying, and we are continually scaling our badging system. So gone are the sharing of the certificates of completion that are so boring.

Enter these really cool badge designs, and I'll get into our design system in a minute. They're not able to really verify what they've learned in our classes. We have a few different business verticals at GA. We do have our lovely enterprise clients. We have consumer, and then we have our government.

So we'll get to this too. You need to think about each type of persona and the needs because they do differ, especially between, like, enterprise and our consumer base. So I'll get in there. And then this is a really easy way that I that I think gets lost. It is implementing badging is a really easy way to get your brand out there, to get that recognition.

So when our marketing team heard about badging, they were like, we are all in. Let's do this because learners, they do share these. That is something that we monitor on the back end of credentials. There's a very nice analytical view where you can see the badges that are being shared and how many are being shared. And then the nice thing is that our marketing team has Sprout Social set up, so we can actually see what's being posted in terms of these badges.

Next slide, please. So, obviously, as a product manager first, technical person second, we go in and, you know, conduct our market research. So, if we can just switch to the FigJam window. This is some of the market research that I did trying to figure out how do I wanna put this together. If we zoom in a little bit more, you know, some of the things that people are probably aware of is AWS.

They have a ton of different certifications. You take an assessment. You get your badge. These are very sought after. I also, last year at InstructureCon, I did go to a talk.

Someone from the online learning consortium was giving a talk on how they implemented badges. And part of, our market research, obviously, they are extremely, what's the word I'm looking for? They're they're extremely popular. A lot of people have them, and what I saw is that we build up. So if we have different levels of learning, like a two day workshop, we have those. If we have a one week or we have a boot camp, those are different time investments.

So when we started going into our design system and thinking about how we wanted to design these badges, we are starting with a very low low key, it's a circle, black, red text, still has the GA logo, still has that learner verification, but the design is a little dialed down because it's like a two day investment over a boot camp where you get Gary. If we switch back, Gary is our moon man. Oh, he was on the other one. Can you go back one slide? Sorry, Jason. So Gary is on our boot camp.

He is our astronaut, and he is cool. You get Gary, and you get a very intricate design for a boot camp. Workshops are a little dialed down and then that excel the accelerator one week, ten week course is kind of in the middle. So we have, that gradual scale of design that goes with our badges. Okay.

We can fast forward now. So I take this to our designing people, and I say, this is what I think we should do, and they deliver. So now we have a design system in place so that if we launch a new boot camp, if we launch a new short course, and if we launch a workshop, we already have a design in place. That makes it very easy to just go back in and make some text adjustments, maybe a quick little, visual, and that, scales the ability to turn around things very, very quickly. And at general assembly, we are moving very, very quickly all the time.

We need to be able to get these badges designed, and we need to be able to get them out, and we need to be able to go to market with them. Aligning the badging to our workforce needs. We are basically putting in that sweet, sweet metadata that Jason talked about. We are putting in the earning criteria. Employers don't care about attendance.

That is an earning criteria, but that's not what they wanna see. They wanna see what an individual has coming out of a general assembly class. They they don't care about the attendance or the group projects. We care about them, but really just showcasing an individual skill set. One of the other pieces which was really cool about Canvas credentials, they told and it's interesting because Instructure told me that I didn't need to talk about Canvas credentials.

I didn't need need need to name the product on this webinar. But one of the things that is really cool, for our consumer base, a lot of the people that are upscaling are looking for a job change. So the really cool thing about Canvas credentials is that they use a tool called Talent Neuron. And in Talent Neuron, you can input skills. It's a it's a preloaded database, so it doesn't have all the skills, but it has enough.

And based off the skills that we tag for a given badge, that will then trigger, real live job postings back to our learners so that they have a very clear view of real life jobs that they can apply for that align with those skills that we input in the batch. That is our number one goal at general assembly is to upscale our learners and to provide them with the career changing satisfaction that they want. Driving engagement and social sharing, we wanna make sure that when we are provisioning the badges to our learners that have met the earning criteria, we are saying we wanna celebrate with you because we really, really do. General assembly cares so much about our learners. We wanna get in there, and we wanna celebrate with you.

So please share this badge. So their networks can celebrate with them too. I got my AWS cert and my whole LinkedIn posse. He was like, oh my god. This is so great.

You know? So we we definitely wanna promote driving the engagement and social sharing on LinkedIn and anywhere else. And then, obviously, we wanna measure success and iterate. So that's viewing those analytics, checking out the number of shares. I gotta tell you the first few badges that we shared, they got shared, but we adjusted our call to action for our learners, and that was the let's celebrate together piece. Don't forget to tag general assembly so we can celebrate right along with you.

So that is something that we iterated on, just just to just to enhance engagement with these badges. Next slide. Remember your persona. The consumer learner, like I said, is different than an enterprise learner. So we made some adjustments.

We we have an enterprise badging suite that we're getting ready to launch, early q two. Like I I said, our consumer learners, they are looking for a job. Our enterprise learners where we have, you know, companies coming to us for upskilling, especially that AI upskilling that Jason mentioned, they have different needs. I don't want to put in front of an enterprise learner a list of jobs because that's turnover and my clients wouldn't be happy. But to Jason's point, there are a number of benefits for enterprise as well.

It's giving your employees that visible recognition of achievement. It's boosting that motivation. It's fostering continuous learning, and people stay at companies for this. They stay at companies that are willing to invest in their upskilling, and it's super, super important. It also helps employer structure training, and tracking that training.

Do I need to retrain? A lot of people are gonna say, I need to retrain my engineers. Yes. They know Python, but they do they know how to use Python with AI? Maybe they don't, and maybe I need to go back and upscale them. So there is still a definite need for enterprise to go and showcase, hey. We care about you, and here's a badge for it.

And then it also gives them, you know, verifiability within the organization. I went and I did this thing, and then it could spread like wildfire. Well, Jason went and did this upscaling on Tableau. I would like to do it too. Can I please take a learning on Tableau? Like, it's perfect.

Stay close to your content developers. Those are the ones and these are the people that this was not done in a vacuum. Badging at GA was a huge cross organizational project. We're talking to marketing to make sure our copy is right. We're interacting with those content developers to make sure that the earning criteria is what we are teaching and that the skills that we are loading into TalentNeuron are correct.

Because the last thing that we want to do is provide a badge in a vacuum that is verifying the wrong things or is out of touch. So stay close to your content developers to make sure that what you're creating is on par with which what with what is actually being taught in class. As I said, encouraging engagement, that was a lesson learned. We changed our ETA, and people really started sharing more. As Jason has said, they should be portable.

So if this is actually the, I think it's the Mozilla backpack that credentials is built on. Like I said, this is super, super important for us. And when we get that, certificate of completion piece in, you can do them both together. So you make a badge, and then there's an extra additional setting on the badge to do a certificate of completion. So we obviously wanna package those two together.

And when we do, our students are able to self-service themselves if they lose either their badge or if they lose their certificate of completion. That cuts down on the amount of work that my development team needs to do in searching for those certificates of completion in S3. So I we are very, very excited to continue work on getting this customized certificate of completion. There are a lot of them. There are a lot of regulatory requirements around these certificates of completion, which is why it's not an easy win.

But we're continuing to do that. And, yes, we are using feedback to iterate on the badge design and messaging, and we are continuing to build new badge designs for different programs that we sell here at General Assembly. And I think that might have been my last slide. Oh, yeah. Tips for getting started.

Define your goals. What do you wanna do and why? Why do you wanna do credentials? Do you wanna do it on Canvas? Do you wanna do it on another platform? That's totally up to you. You need to understand your learners and employers. Like I said, I know that my employers are probably not gonna want me, streaming real life jobs to their people because that might introduce turnover. So think about that.

Just obviously, this is just a product management thing. Always, always thinking about the personas that you're serving with a tool that you're implementing. Communicate the value. It's very important that when we launch a product or when we launch credentials that we're not only communicating value outside of GA, but internally to GA as well. So we have a lot of internal things going on right now to prepare our salespeople to go out and and sell the enterprise side of this.

Make them actionable. Like I said, we're doing that skill tagging, to make sure that we are getting those jobs back to our consumer folks. We're saying share them. They are gonna be at like Jason said, people add these to resumes. They add them to email signatures.

They share them on socials. It's perfect. And then just develop a clear credentialing framework. So that take comes back into that design system that we're talking about. We have, like, our workshop, then we have our accelerators, then we have our boot camps.

And there are some other things in the works that I can't talk about, but we have some really, really cool badges coming out of the woodwork. I hope, anyway, I have a ticket in with our creative team. So keep an eye on the general assembly space because we'll have some really, cool new badges coming up, and that's all I can say on that. If I tell if I told you, I would be in trouble. But keep an eye on that space.

I'm very, very excited about our next, iteration of this. This is this is our second quarter doing badging. So we did about four or five badges last year in q four. And in q one, I think we are at nineteen new badges that we can offer our students and that we can offer our clients. So thanks again for having me today.

I actually do think that was the last slide, and I will go on mute. Amazing. Bianca, I'm wondering, how we are doing in the chat with regards to questions. Did we have some questions come in? Yeah. I mean, we've got one question in, and anyone if you've got any questions right now, this is the perfect time to pop them in the chat, and I'll make sure that, we get to them in a moment.

Our first question is from someone whose organization is maybe a little more limited on resources. Are there any services available to help them design and build those credentials? Yeah. I can speak to that for sure. Instructure has an entire, team of instructional designers and kind of folks that are at the ready to help you build out not only the metadata that Heather was talking about, that really thoughtful metadata that's really important, but also the actual badge design itself and create a sequence of badges for you. So we can actually take that that entire process off your plate.

If need be, we have an entire team, kind of ready to go for that. And that goes for those certificates as well, right, that that Heather was talking about. We can help design those as well. Yeah. And we've got one other question in the chat about cost.

What was the cost to develop badges? I'm not sure if that's just a general question about costs or specific to the general assembly badges that you were just talking about, Heather. I can take that question. I don't know. It was basically a resource, resource thing for us. We do have a creative team in place, so there were some resource hours there.

But other than the resource hours, we didn't have to put any more budget towards the development of badges. Obviously, with each badge through Canvas credentials or any other platform, there is a price, per u I think it's a price per user, Jason, which is really nice because you are not charged on per badge. So if I wanted to do a boot camp and have, like, four badges throughout that boot camp, I would only pay the the very low, competitive cost, for, one user. So, not not, like, a monetary cost or resource resource cost to develop the badges and then just what you would pay, per user. Yeah.

Correct. Always good to get that that view on what it act what actually goes all into this. So another question. With regards to outcomes, how do you track the usage of the credential, and what employers are either accepting them or looking for them? Oh, you want me to tackle that? Okay. So what we're seeing is that there's there's a piece inside the metadata regarding evidence.

And so you can actually track that piece of evidence, you know, in a number of different ways, but you can also just kind of report out on on that. And that evidence actually stays with that badge for for its entire life. Right? So long after they leave your organization of of that, that actual outcome of what they did, stays inside that metadata. So those employers are are kind of when they click on it and this kind of dovetails into a a secondary question that I actually see in the chat, which is, like, what makes that badge verifiable? Right? Which is there is an actual mechanism inside the credential itself that you can click on that says verify this credential, and it basically phones home back to the issuing organization to make sure that, oh, okay. This was actually done by general assembly and not done by, you know, John Smith in his basement who created a digital badge somehow.

Like, there's, you know, no offense to any John Smiths on the call. But this is what, this is what we are talking about when we're talking about verifiable. We're able to go back and, a, check the issuer that issued it, and, b, look at the metadata inside of that, for any outcomes or pieces of evidence that might be, necessary. Does that help? Yeah. And there's the the second part of the question about being curious to know more about employers that are either accepting, these kind of credentials or are looking for them.

You know, it's it's interesting because the the thing about credentials right now is that we're when I talk with employers, they're basically saying, like, this is the the separator, the great the separator. Right? So an, an application tracking system, when you take in resumes, may not actually be able to flag that digital credential on a resume. There there's there may be no delineation there. So Heather and I could be applying for the same exact position. Right? So, boom, we both go into the system.

We both have similar on paper, skills and and requirements. It's what we're hearing from employers is it's the second round where we both get brought in and we're able to actually showcase those digital credentials and and get them verified. That's when it starts to really separate the pack. Right? So Heather has, Python certified and verified digital credentials, and I just have it in a bullet point form that I know Python, it's almost done it's almost unfair. Right? Heather's definitely gonna have that leg up on me because her credential is actually verified.

So what I'm hearing from them is, yes. We care, but it's usually the second round where they start to really, see that difference. That's a really interesting I don't know that I would have guessed that, but you make a really excellent point about it's verifiable compared to a bullet point. Yeah. I mean, look.

AI, we could all go create a resume that is spectacular in about twenty five seconds with JetGPT. And so we we need some way to be able to kind of parse out what makes sense and what was done, you know, from a machine and and what's real and what's not real. So this is this is kind of the the golden ticket in a way. Fantastic. Alright.

We've got another question here. Can you speak to examples of how you certify a skill? Or is it is it all assessment? Is it project completion? I'm sure this question could go either specific to general assembly or more generally about, Jason, what you're seeing in the industry. I can do. Yes. I think it's gonna depend on the industry.

For GA, it is we are not it's not an assessment or anything. It's is the student showing up to class? Are they participating in group projects? Do they show, via these projects that they have mastered a skill? So that's how we are certifying. But if you look at, like, in AWS, for example, Amazon Web Services, you do need to sit for an exam. You basically need to take everything out of your pockets. It is it is very it is very stressful taking an AWS exam, and they are assessing, actually going in and quizzing you on those skills, giving you a time frame in which to take the test to make sure that you master it and can answer it like that.

So I really do think it depends on the industry. GA does not do assessments to verify skill. We are looking at their earning criteria. We are looking at the learning outcomes. Again, stay close to your content developers.

They have all that information for you so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. But AWS and, like, a CompTIA, they are all assessing, via quiz. Jason? Yeah. And I I think if you it it depends on the kind of delivery mechanism as well. Right? So if you're using a Canvas as or a learning management system in general as the way for you to to kind of hold all of your assessments in there, we have a way of tying those assessments to a specific digital credential with a specific parameter.

So for example, Heather achieved this badge because she got an eighty five percent or higher on x assessment. And one thing that we're also seeing kind of rapidly grow in our in our ecosystem is this idea of our pathways. So if you imagine a visual map, of skills, right, where a user starts on the left hand side of a of a a path, and they know that they have to do x and then y and then z. And there's this idea that we were talking about at the beginning of this, which is stackability. Right? So you're stacking you're stacking all of these digital credentials along a pathway that's very visual for the end user to see, okay, they have to do x, y, and z, and then they are earning this larger, this larger credential that's been created.

And it goes back to kinda Heather's point about how you're designing these credentials. Right? These could be the black circle that's kinda basic building itself into a larger badge that might have a bit more, metadata. It might look quite a bit different from a visual perspective. And so we're also seeing that approach happen as well. And Gary.

Right. Thank you, Heather. That's great. So there there's a ton of different ways that people are leveraging the system in different ways, but I don't wanna I would be remissed if I didn't mention Pathways as, like, a massive tool, to really show people how they can advance through a particular program, and earn credentials along the way. Fantastic.

And and once again, if anyone has any questions, you could still pop them in the chat. We've got a little bit more time. I'm gonna throw a question out there. What do you think is sort of the future of where this kind of credentialing is going? I think, I'll go Kyle, go first. Kyle, please.

Please go. Yes. To Jason's point earlier, AI is everywhere right now. We need to be able to verify that people have AI skills, and that that is across engineering, product management. Everyone's gonna have to learn how to use AI.

So I I foresee a lot of AI credentials coming out to back these learnings that people are taking. I see this becoming more popular, because it is low cost, to develop these badges. It is a great way to get your name out while also providing your students and learners and clients this really cool, tangible thing that they can use. I think certificates of completion, like, yeah, they're great, but they're kind of blood. It's not like new age, and it's not cutting edge.

I really think that, like, with a little badge, with all this metadata supporting it, that we're gonna continue to see, we're gonna continue to see this space grow. But, Jason, what's your take on it? Yeah. I'm I think it's pretty evident to most people that there is a skills gap between even higher ed and the workforce and the employers. And so I see digital credentials as kind of the bridge between those two things and how they can become more aligned. So what we're really seeing what I'm seeing is folks like, Florida Gulf Coast University, for example.

Right? They are they have taken badging by the horns, and they have said we are committed to this. But it's not good enough because our graduates weren't being recognized or seen the way that we want them to be seen, or they weren't getting hired at the rate by the local employers that they were. So what did they do about it? They reached out and they built relationships with all of the local employers to say, what skills are you all missing? Like, what it what is it that you want out of our graduates that would make them super employable? Right? And so it's building those relationships, and I think you're gonna see that more and more where there's this this need for interconnection between the the higher ed institutions and the workforce to to build those relationships so that workforce continues to get what they actually need, from a skill set. So I I think you're gonna continue to see that. And and FGCU, just as a call out, they they have built a really cool program where as long as they have specific credentials that they graduate with, local employers will guarantee them a first round interview based on the fact that they they know that those skills are baked into those credentials.

So there's a lot happening in the space, and I I really see, a lot of momentum happening in the space for sure. Well, that's one heck of a motivator too if you're tail end of school and you're you're hoping for a job. Oh, we've got a great question here in the chat right now. You've given some great examples of the benefits for badging in higher ed or seeking employment. Can you give an example of benefits for internal badging within the corporate setting that benefit the business? Heather, do you Heather, you want that one or you want me to take that one? I have a whole slide I just made for this, like, last week, and I told I sent it to Jason.

I was like, look at all my talking points. Like I said, we are working on releasing a brand new suite of badges for our enterprise clients. And part of my job is to enable my sales team to be able to speak to the benefits. Some of the things that I outlined is it is still a visible a visible recognition of achievement. This person, while working a full time job, went and they went and they upskilled because it was important to them.

So so that's really important. It highlights their growth and gives them a competitive edge when they're looking at promotions. One of the things that GA asked is what what did you do this year that wasn't a goal? Did you do anything extra? This is like a place where, an employee can say, yeah. You know, I I upskilled, and I have this badge. And if you go to this badge, you can see all of the earning criteria that I had to meet in order to get this badge.

So that kinda gives them an edge there, and it does reinforce the company's focus on upskilling and being dedicated to their employees. And in a world where we're seeing a lot of turnover, this is I think Jason has some data backing this, but this is actually a really good, like, motivator for people to stay. My company cares about my upskilling, so I'm gonna continue to stay and and in hopes of potentially getting even more upskilling further down the line. That was when I worked at the Wharton School of Business. They they were very motivated in supplying us with anything we needed to stay cutting edge.

So So I stayed for five years, you know, like, that's a big time to stay somewhere when you're in tech. But it was because they, you know, they care GA cares too. I actually did our product management course. I have a badge for that now. Through the badges that I made, I was like, well, I'm in here.

You know, I meet the earning criteria. I get a badge to you. And it does enhance, like, the the reputation internally. And I I think it's a good motivator, and it builds morale, and it gets the word across that, you know, oh, Jason did the Tableau course. I would like to do that too.

And in the end, I believe that employers are much better for offering this because they end up with an upskilled team that is able to kick it with the latest and greatest technologies. So that's that's my my two cents on that for whatever it's worth. But Jason probably has more speakers. I agree with all of that. I also would say from a compliance standpoint.

Right? So and it's funny that this just came up today in an email to me that was like, hey. It's compliance time of the year. You have to go through all of these security trainings, and you have to do all of these different types of, watch this video, take this quiz. We're all very probably familiar with this type of style of, like, compliance. And so from an HR perspective even, there is, you know, use cases there where you can track and set expiration dates on these credentials.

Right? So I know that Heather earned this credential last year, but it's coming up and she's due for it this coming year. And it's so it's it becomes an internal tracking system along with that motivation for these different systems to easily track where they are and what they need to do still. And if you if you start to think about those pathways that I kind of wanted you to visualize. Right? Imagine a an employer being able to present their employees with, well, here's here's the steps that you need to take. Sometimes I've taken these internal trainings and I'm in a in a course or I'm in some sort of system, and I'm like, I have no idea how many modules are left in this thing, but I feel like I'm never leaving.

And so, like, being able to provide a really clear vision of what they're gonna get when they get out of that, is also motivation, to what Heather was talking about as well. Yeah. It's interesting. It'd be almost like an alternative toward the traditional, learning management system for your compliance training and something a little easier to display. And and, Heather, as someone who just I just did my yearly review, it's that that is such a good idea of, like, these are wonderful things to be to bring up in those reviews and say, hey.

I have provided this. I I can throw out one more use case just, just for the for the group. Right? We're we've been talking a lot about, like, the digital world of of how these things get get kind of achieved. But a lot of what happens in workforce is done face to face and in person. And so the idea of being able to create a QR code for that's a representation of this digital credential.

So imagine going to a seminar that's part of your professional growth path, and at the end of that seminar, you scan a QR code and you've earned that credential or you've gone to that particular workshop. There's there's real value in folks being able to not earn a participation, but, like, if there's actual meat behind that workshop and you attended it and you you spent three days working with a team going through things, you wanna be able to pull out what skills you got from that. Right? Whether it was communication or leadership or whatever it was, I think there's a real, there's a real use case there as well from a a team building and, skill set, perspective. One question in the chat. How long or how many classes is the typical path to earn a badge? Is there a typical path? I think that depends on the company.

Through GA, we offer badging for a two day workshop. You don't get Gary with that workshop yet. But you you you sat with us. You went through what you needed to do. You met the earning criteria of that badge.

Yeah. We're gonna give you, you know, we're gonna give you one. Our one week accelerators have a badge, and then, like, our boot camps are twelve weeks or longer depending on if you partake in one of our part time boot camps. So it really all depends. You can also, scaffold badging throughout our program too, which we we looked out for for one of our programs that we're launching, just to keep people involved.

And that's like, if they finish, like, a Power BI module, do we then give them a Power BI batch, and then they move on to the Tableau module, and then we give them a Tableau badge? So I think it all depends on how your organization wants to structure the badging, but we award badging at every aspect of our curricula, whether it's workshop or you're putting in that twelve weeks or more for a boot camp. I hope that's helpful. And I think to just add to that, there's the there's the flip side, which comes up on a regular basis, which is badge fatigue or digital credential fatigue. Right? If they go through a module in a specific course, a module one badge probably isn't super sought after on LinkedIn. Right? That user's not gonna be able to necessarily share that and and, like, get a leg up.

So I think there's some things to think about on the other side, which is, like, you know, how much is too much and how much does badging kind of devalue if you do it too much. And so I think there's just some things to think about there. Yeah. It definitely seems like the answer is there's not a typical path. There's not a tip because every group every audience is gonna be different.

Every situation is gonna be different, and I'd just be really thoughtful about how many, how are you connecting it to skills. Do what's right for your situation is what I'm hearing. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

So I had a question, and and this is the thing we're always kinda wondering. Well well, how do I make a proposal about this to my company? But the I would love to make a proposal to senior leadership at my organization. Can you share some specifics on where I might find data on employee engagement and retention numbers when badging and credentials are used? Show the numbers. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we can share those after the fact. I don't have them pulled up in a tab at the moment, but I'm, Jennifer, I'm happy to to share those with you. If you wanna reach out, happy to happy to share those. They are definitely out there, and they're pretty, I would say, convincing, when you start to look at it from a retention standpoint and and just an overall, kind of happiness score. I don't know what you wanna call it, like a customer happiness score or an employer happiness score.

The numbers don't lie. So I'm happy to share those with you and and help you, you know, even talk a little bit through how you might make that proposal if that would be helpful. Sure. It will definitely be helpful. Always nice to get help with those proposals.

We've got a question here about sharing accomplishments. Much of what you're describing relies on the learner to share their accomplishments. Is there any discussion about using something like xAPI to integrate all these badges and certifications onto one, accessible universal platform? I have feelings on this. So one in for Canvas credentials, a learner will get their own backpack. And with that backpack, they get their own portal.

I also represent the data team at GA. And to me, those credentials are not GA's credentials. Once we provision them, it changes to the learners. And there is PII in that data. Someone's name is their PII.

What they've done at general assembly is their information. So I would not feel right, automating that type of sharing on behalf of our learners. Jason, I'm not sure if you have. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that that's a spot on. Like, the the learner takes ownership over that data, and it so if you're asking about, like, housing all of your credentials from one, like, that you wanna issue in one place, that might be a slightly different conversation. But if you're talking about, you know, the learner itself, there are that's why the the wallet, the digital badging backpack, whatever you want whatever term you wanna use is open so that I can earn a badge from a competitor, like a non Canvas credential badge as long as it's built with the open badge standard, which we talked about at the beginning of this. As long as it's on that open badge standard, it can be brought into the wallet, and that can be done via many different ways. But the the goal is to make sure that whatever platform holds that credential, it's open so that it can be taken out or brought in.

And so the the learner has that kind of last that last say on where that credential goes. Kevin is not getting a badge for this session in the chat. If you look at the chat, you can also see a lot of people who are really interested in that that, those data points that we had talked about earlier. So, Jason, the best thing is to reach out to you after the session, and you can send that information, offer whatever data points. Yeah, definitely some interest, especially about how it impacts retention.

So that's Yep. Pretty nice proof point. I think we're gonna do one last question before we wrap things up. I'm gonna toss this out there. I know, Heather, you shared some stuff about, like, how you you structured your process to help this, this project succeed.

If each of you could give one piece of advice to someone starting on this journey, how to kick things off right, make this this project easier for them to bring credentialing into whatever they're doing in a thoughtful and meaningful way, what would you recommend people do early on? I think attending, like, this session is, like, a great starting point. We have provided you a lot of details around start with your market research, understand how many badges you want to give, get that design system in place so that you can easily scale, have a good call to action when you are awarding the badges. These are all key components of being successful, with a badging solution. But coming here today is a great first step. Asking Jason for that data that you need to make a good argument, and he will provide it with you.

Instructure provided me with it when I needed it. This is a great first step for everyone on this call today. Jason, any any first steps you would recommend, or you're just, like, all in on what Heather just said? Yeah. I mean, I just thumbs up to that. I would also say just really start thinking about your your governance processes internally.

Like, who you know, it it's never too early to start planning out how these bet you know, Heather gave you a really good map of, like, how they went about things. But I think it's never too early to start thinking about how are these things gonna get approved to be issued, how are they gonna get designed. Like, I think the strategy behind it is a really thoughtful piece to start with is, like, where are we and what do we wanna do? So starting starting small and and making sure that all of the building blocks are in place before just saying, hey. We're gonna go issue some badges and hope it goes okay. I think there's a lot of thoughtfulness that goes behind what Heather was illustrating today for sure.

Yeah. Well, those are great ways to kick this off in a in a way that's gonna lead to a a logical end where it it actually provides impact. We're reaching the end of our time here today. Now I noticed Heather popped her LinkedIn contact info right there in the chat if everyone wants to get in touch with her and chat about badging. Jason, what's the best way to get in touch with you? I will just throw my email in the chat.

Perfect. That's alright. Let me do that now. And thank you, Heather, for getting ahead of things and just popping that in the chat. Badge for Heather.

Oh, and I think I needed it to I think I got everybody. Oh, I'm seeing it in there perfect. The funny thing is we were starting badging. I made, like, a Canva badge for my team, and it was the sparkly badge. So if you are lacking a design team, Canva is a great source for creating badges as well.

Oh, that's a really good idea. Even if if you're just getting started with that, that's fantastic. Well, we've reached the end of our time here together. Big thanks again to our sponsor and structure and, of course, today's fabulous speakers, Jason Gildner and Heather Luna. And, of course, thanks to all of you here in the audience.

Thanks for those fantastic questions. Thanks for choosing to be with us today. Whether you're here live or maybe you're watching this recording, we're always happy to have you and hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks, everyone. See you. Bye, y'all.