Digital badges for Continuing Education
Showcase your skills on LinkedIn and beyond
Welcome to the next step in verifying your skills and professional achievements: Digital badges enhance your traditional qualifications and help you stand out in the rapidly evolving job market.
What is a digital badge?
A digital badge is a verifiable credential that showcases your skills, achievements and knowledge. These microcredentials take the concept of a physical certificate online, providing evidence of abilities and expertise.
Digital badges are more than just digital stickers; they carry real power through metadata. This metadata links the badge to your name and the specific criteria you met to demonstrate mastery. The badges allow an employer or end viewer to verify that the credential was issued to you by UW–Madison.
Continuing Education badges
UW–Madison Continuing Education offers a variety of badges for professionals in areas including:
Leadership, Management & Workplace Skills Teaching & Learning, including fundamentals of online teaching and AI-enabled teaching
Technology, including the fundamentals of artificial intelligence
Languages, including Spanish for reading and translation
You can find badges in these areas by:
Exploring all badges.
Find all badges offered by the Division of Continuing Studies.
Checking the course page.
When you select a course on the search page, the course page indicates whether a digital badge is available in the summary section.
Badge benefits
Digital badges offer significant benefits if you want to advance in your current career or are seeking new opportunities. Digital badges can help you:
Stand out in the job market: Showcase your skills and achievements in a way that is easily understandable and verifiable by employers.
Enhance your career trajectory: Highlight specialized skills and competencies that may not be apparent from traditional degrees alone.
Share verified skills: Easily share competencies across platforms such as LinkedIn, personal websites, email signatures and digital resumes. This allows you to share your skills with a broad audience, including recruiters and hiring managers.
Boost personal branding and networking: Use badges on professional social networking sites to provide opportunities for sharing and networking. Cultivate a strong personal brand through these credentials to make your profile act as an online resume, increasing your visibility to potential employers.
Gain insights into the labor market: Through UW–Madison’s digital badging platform, you can click on the skills represented in your badge and see labor market data and job postings tied to those specific competencies.
Earning your badge
To obtain a digital badge, you must demonstrate mastery of the required skills. The process typically involves completing the specified learning outcomes and assessment criteria:
Complete your Continuing Education course.
Meet assessment criteria: You must successfully meet the specific criteria established for the badge. This often involves an assessment. For example, earning a badge might require passing a written exam or demonstrating practical skills through evaluation of correct techniques.
Receive your verifiable credential: Once the earning criteria have been met, you will receive an email with information about your badge and a link to download it.
Using your badge
Because the badge contains metadata detailing the earning criteria, it provides transparency about what you know and can do. The information proving your achievement is hosted securely, making it tamper-proof.
While the issuing organization controls the metadata, you, as the learner, have control over whether, how, and with whom you choose to share the badge. Most often, people use their badges on LinkedIn profiles under “Licenses and Certifications“.
