The benefits of digital badges and credentials extend well beyond agility. For instance, organizations can award badges to validate employees’ individual competencies and progress, reward achievements and keep them motivated. Workers can then display these in their email signatures or online profiles.

Digital badges and credentials also make it far easier for employers to map skills across the organization, set up learning pathways and monitor development goals. In addition, they can support organizations’ diversity and inclusion strategies by ensuring remote workers are able to advance their careers and share their progress as easily as employees working on site. The acceleration of digital working brought about by the pandemic shows us this will be critical in future, with 83% of workers now saying they want to work in a hybrid environment.

There are challenges, too. For digital credentials to be truly portable, secure and verifiable, there needs to be effective collaboration and alignment among platform providers, technology suppliers, user organizations, regulators, and the myriad institutions offering credentials. Industry bodies such as the non-profit International Council on Badges and Credentials (ICoBC)1, in which Speexx plays a leading role, are already working hard to bring this about. The ICoBC links stakeholders together, shares information and best practice, and advises user organizations how to introduce the technology successfully, often by connecting them with similar organizations that are further along with their deployments.