Announcing Digital Badges for Custom Tracks and Journeys: Boost Learner Engagement with Company-Branded Credentials

With 87 percent of organizations dealing with skills gaps in their workforces, a great learning program can be a competitive advantage. It’s far more efficient to cultivate the skills you need in-house than it is to hire for them in a tight talent market. That’s why 83 percent of organizational decision-makers have made training and development a critical priority within their companies, according to Skillsoft’s Lean Into Learning 2021 report.

But a learning program is only effective if your people are actually using it. That may sound obvious, but the fact is that helping people make time for training has long been a pain point for learning and development (L&D) leaders.

Custom, proprietary learning tracks and journeys are one way that L&D teams can drive learner engagement. Employees tend to naturally gravitate toward learning experiences that are meaningful and relevant to their roles, and that’s exactly what custom training content delivers. Today, we’re announcing a new way for L&D teams to boost learner engagement even further: digital badges for custom tracks and journeys.

Digital badges have already been available for Skillsoft’s prebuilt content library. Now, L&D teams can also create their own company-branded badges for their custom tracks and journeys in Skillsoft Percipio. And these credentials are proven to inspire and empower people to invest in their own upskilling: Badges have been shown to boost login rates by 28 percent, learner return rates by 8 percent, and completion rates by 10 percent.

Learners can now earn powerful, portable credentials for completing your company’s custom learning experiences. Here’s why that matters.

Most organizations are grappling with skills gaps, but all skills gaps are not the same. Some companies may need more artificial intelligence (AI) and automation skills. Some may need to cultivate cybersecurity expertise. Still others may need to grow leadership skills in the next generation of managers. Similarly, every person learns best in their own way, and each learner brings their own level of preexisting knowledge to their career advancement. Personalization is vital to designing learning programs that empower both people and organizations to grow together.

Your L&D team creates custom learning experiences tailored to your company’s specific skills gaps and your employees’ unique career paths. Custom digital badges give your people an easy way to celebrate, verify, and share their upskilling accomplishments in these custom learning programs both in and outside your organization.

Just like the digital badges Skillsoft offers for prebuilt content, custom digital badges are personal, shareable records of a learner’s achievements. Each badge is verified through a blockchain, creating an unchangeable record of the badge, who earned it, and who issued it. And digital badges comply with IMS Global Learning Consortium Open Badge standards, allowing learners to display badges across the web and share them with peers and managers freely.

The difference is that custom digital badges are designed by your organization for your organization. Your L&D team can create, publish, and deliver company-branded credentials that better reflect your employees’ unique development paths. You can even award badges retroactively to employees who completed custom tracks and journeys before the creation of custom badges.

“What I liked the most was the ability to choose from the different badging templates,” said Steven Potts, Global Talent Development Leader at Diebold Nixdorf, after trying Skillsoft’s custom digital badges. “I think that's awesome because that's what we were looking for. We want our badges to look like us."

By rewarding employees with authoritative credentials for completing company-specific training, L&D teams can inspire and empower people to invest more in their upskilling. Training is no longer just an internal mandate — it’s a way for employees to earn concrete credentials that set them apart. And you build brand recognition as your proud learners share their digital badges on social media, in their personal portfolios, and with their professional networks.

With the way technology and business move today, there will always be new skills and competencies for people to master — new challenges for companies to tackle and new opportunities to seize. Rather than scrambling to close every new skills gap as it appears, organizations need to create cultures of learning that enable employees and employers to grow together, no matter what comes their way. The ability to agilely respond to constantly evolving strategic goals is the real competitive advantage of investing in learning and development.

And a culture of learning, of course, requires employees who are motivated and engaged in their own career development. Custom digital badges can help foster that motivation and engagement by tying the company’s custom training to real, valuable outcomes for individual learners. When the organization’s and the employee’s needs are aligned in this way, it drives growth, innovation, and transformation across the entire enterprise.

Learn how Skillsoft’s custom digital badges can help you reskill, upskill, and futureproof your organization. Request a demo or connect with your Skillsoft account team today.