What Do Online Badges Mean to You?

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Career Development   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Gold Hat: "We are Federales...you know, the mounted police."
Dobbs: "If you're the police where are your badges?"
Gold Hat: "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"

-- from the 1948 film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

What we learn and how we learn it is not always in a classroom or training session. Our everyday experience, knowledge and exposure to situations prepare us and educate us on a number of subjects, but there’s no one around to give us some form of parchment every time we solve a problem or pull a project out of the fire. That kind of recognition is restricted and regulated and rightly so, but what if we added a more “open” method to authenticate our abilities? If such a method existed and received an appropriate level of business support, we could demonstrate multiple aspects of our skills that would help us in attaining professional goals as well as assist us in getting better jobs.

Recently, the Clinton Global Initiative took a step toward getting those talents acknowledged by committing itself to establish a new means of assessing academic and technical skills through a concept called “Open Badges”--an online representation of skills or achievements you’ve earned, more commonly recognized in …

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