More than just a pretty face

I’ve blogged in favour of digital badges in the past, not because they’re colourful motivators – which arguably they are, at least for some people – but because they represent an achievement.

While the robustness of the criteria for earning a badge may be challenged, as may be the assessment of meeting said criteria, the concept holds true: a badge must be earned by demonstrating that you have done something.

What that something is is a variable to be defined. Some badges such as the ones that are popular among IT geeks are earned by completing a training program or by passing an exam. I call these “certification badges”.

However I maintain a stronger implementation of the idea emerges when we earn the badge by successfully executing a task (or a suite of tasks). I call these “practitioner badges”.

For example, you might complete a 40-hour course and pass a massive multiple-choice quiz to earn an XYZ-issued “Project Management” badge. That’s quite an achievement.

But I’d be more impressed (and more confident as an employer) if you were to demonstrate how you’ve applied the XYZ-endorsed principles to a real project in the real world, thereby earning a “Project Manager” badge. To me, that’s a greater achievement because it shifts the focus of the exercise from the activity (learning) to its outcome (performance).

In an organisational context, I see opportunities to blend the tasks to enrich the experience. For example, one task may be to apply a principle to your current project, while the next task is to share your reflection of doing so on the enterprise social network; thereby facilitating not only metacognition and expert feedback, but also peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

Celebrating the latest cohort of people who’ve earned badges in the same forum may also generate a bit of FOMO.

In any case, my point is a badge should be more than just a pretty face. I propose we distinguish between two types of badge – namely a certification badge and a practitioner badge – with the latter representing an achievement above and beyond the former.

How to fix our senseless compliance training

All big organisations have a Learning Management System.

It’s used to track and record the training that the employees do. In practice, it tends to be used to administer compliance training, though it can be much broader than that.

And this is a good thing. Despite the scorn that LMS’s attract, we should be tracking and recording the training that our employees do – especially compliance training.

But here’s the rub…

Let’s say I work at Bank A. I do all my compliance training within the first 3 months of starting at the company, and I keep those certifications up to date every 2 years. That’s normal.

Then I get a job at Bank B. But because my training records are locked up in Bank A’s LMS, I have to do my compliance training all over again.

This does not make any sense, because the laws governing privacy, anti money laundering, OH&S, and all the other topics, are the same for both banks! If I’m compliant at Bank A, odds are I’m compliant at Bank B as well.

I see re-doing my compliance training as a problem, not just because it’s an inconvenience for me personally, but also because the financial services sector alone employs half a million people in Australia. That’s a lot of people, a lot of movement, a lot of training hours, and a lot of wastage.

There has to be a better way, and as I explain in the video below, I propose the accreditation of compliance training with open badges as the solution.

Now some people misunderstand this idea, and they’ll say it’s not the role of the regulator to train a company’s employees. And I agree, but that’s not the idea.

The idea is that the regulator accredits the training that is delivered by the company to its employees, and authorises the issuing of the official badges for that training.