What is the answer? Enter the world of digital credentials.

A Digitized, Verifiable Professional Profile

At the foundational level, candidates convert their professional profiles into digitized and verifiable credentials that enterprises access quickly and securely when recruiting or promoting staff. In today’s aggressive labor market, having digital credentials is a competitive differentiator in the workforce. It separates a candidate’s application from random submissions, thus streamlining the selection process and generating cost savings for the hiring enterprise through greater efficiencies.

With enterprises utilizing direct sourcing, talent marketplaces, and other online recruiting platforms and tools, digital credentialing provides a centralized, verifiable means to elevate an organization’s talent acquisition strategy. While a digitized and verifiable professional profile is a game-changer for those candidates adopting the technology, it represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential for digital credentials in both the workforce and the workplace.

Digital Credentialing for Granular Achievements

The future for digital credentials lies in digital badges and certificates — which support many Future of Work objectives. The graphic element of a badge or certificate combined with metadata describing the knowledge and activities required to earn it is innovative for verifying competencies.

Whether it’s an enterprise, university, or professional association, developing its own digital credentials to support advancement and motivation can pay dividends. Credly, a leading provider in the digital credential space, says, “Digital credentials save your organization money on marketing, human resources, and recruiting costs, which has an impact on the financial bottom line.”

Credly highlights the benefits of digital badges and certificates in several settings. Let’s explore some of those implementations and the value they provide employees and job candidates.

Universities Focused on Marketable Skills and Achievements

More colleges and universities are thinking beyond the traditional transcript for their graduates. The goal for many is to help students bridge the gap between academics and employment. Classes and grades lack evidence of actual capabilities. However, providing workshops, internships, and other opportunities to showcase knowledge and real-world execution and earning a digital certificate of achievement, makes students more marketable to potential employers.

Professional Associations Provide Visible and Shareable Digital Credentials

Many associations attract members through credentials, certifications, or educational offerings. Those achievements are often awarded through paper-based certificates that members proudly frame and display in their offices or cubicles. However, times are changing. While a tangible certificate is still an option, it should be complemented by a digital credential that is sharable online. Credly says this serves two purposes: 1) members can share the credential on social media, job boards, resumes, and email signatures and 2) it provides the association with visibility and marketing opportunities by having its digital credential appear on LinkedIn and other platforms.

Enterprises Implement Digital Badges and Certificates to Engage and Retain Employees

As organizations hire permanent employees and contingent workers, having transparency in their complete skillsets is critical to react appropriately to evolving markets and workforce fluctuations. Equally important is employee engagement to attract and retain workers, especially those seeking advancement opportunities. Digital credentialing is playing a major role in those initiatives.

Enterprises are offering their own digital badges and certificates through learning tracks and skill-based activities. Earning a badge or certificate verifies competencies with evidence that the organization can use for talent visibility and career progression initiatives while giving workers shareable online recognition of their achievements.

IBM Goes Global with Digital Badge Program 

Few enterprises are doing digital badges as successfully as IBM. The company’s IBM Global Skills Initiative was launched to ensure the global IT workforce was current and competitive in its skills. A decentralized IT structure presented challenges in identifying skilled experts. However, by offering four types of digital badges across learning tracks from foundational to expert level, the company has been able to verify skills and competencies.

Credly shares some of the outcomes from the IBM Global Skills Initiative:

• Powerful data analytics and reporting features that enable IBM to produce global heat maps of talent.
• Linkage with talent acquisition and HR systems to enhance visibility and understanding of employee career planning and progression.
• Ability to track skills at the nano level and make them discoverable to HR and hiring managers in real time.
• Being able to differentiate employees by skills, while seeing a complete view of the individual’s broader competencies and abilities.

The program grew immensely popular among workers, leading to 195 countries represented in the skills registry; 92% of badge earners saying the badge verifies job skills; and 87% of badge earners feeling more engaged with the company and motivated to learn more. In 2018 alone, there were 1,600 different badged activities. This has paid off in IBM’s marketing efforts as well — 200 million social media impressions (or an equivalent of $39,000 per month in marketing value.

According to Credly, “Digital credentials allow a company to create a culture of recognition, rather than just awarding participation trophies for showing up. Digital credentials allow managers to see the achievements of their most dedicated and engaged employees. With access to real insights, companies can make more-informed human capital decisions.”

The post Digital Credentials Provide Talent Visibility, Skill Recognition appeared first on The Future of Work Exchange.

The latest United States jobs report was rosy from a certain perspective (adding 517,000 jobs in January alone), one that reflects not only the lowest unemployment figures in nearly 55 years, but also an awkward juxtaposition of the discussions around an economic downturn and the continued fight against inflation.

For all the talk about a blooming-yet-complicated job market, there’s another side to this positive news. Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research finds that 73% of businesses currently face a critical challenge in the months ahead: a lack of candidates with the required skillsets for open positions. This is yet another representation of why the skills-based organization (SBO) is a true opportunity to, essentially, reimagine the ways they think about talent acquisition and the role of talent in getting work done.

The most progressive way of thinking here is to apply agility-led principles to the realm of talent acquisition and talent engagement by 1) harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to revamp the candidate-matching process, 2) expanding “known” skills taxonomy in an automated manner to account for innovative and future roles, 3) developing a central, on-demand database of skillsets across talent communities (talent pools, talent networks, current employees, etc.), and, 4) leveraging a multi-dimensional nexus of skillsets and expertise from which to address new and evolving requirements based on the trajectory of the greater organization.

The foundational elements of the skills-based organization revolve around the concepts of rethinking the parallels between talent and work; thus, the very future of the skills-based organization depends on forward-thinking strategies, ideas, and, of course technology. Here are the crucial elements that will shape the SBO in the months ahead:

• Digital credentialing will emerge as a powerful disruptor in the skills validation market. Even in the technologically-advanced days in which we live, validating skillsets and expertise is largely a manual game. Talent acquisition execs and hiring managers (as well as other core HR leaders) must review portfolios, speak to references, confirm education and backgrounds, etc. to ensure that a candidate holds the proper skillsets for the role in which it is applying. Digital credentialing platforms remove nearly all of the guesswork and the tactical elements of skills validation and provide a veritable gateway into verified skillsets, strengths, certifications, etc. that candidates can maintain throughout the duration of their career. Solutions like Credly, Sertifier, Accredible, and Certifier are revolutionizing both the candidate-facing and hiring-led aspects of digital credentialing.
• Blockchain realizes its potential and becomes a gateway for talent. Across the business spectrum, blockchain has so many potential paths: augmenting data warehousing, tightening legal and financial intelligence, and, yes, reinventing the ways enterprises find and connect with talent. In a hyper-competitive and globalized talent marketplace, the power of blockchain truly shines through; by defragmenting traditional barriers to talent acquisition, blockchain-fueled candidate networks enable hiring managers (and similar leaders) with the ability, in real-time, to view candidate profiles, validate expertise, and confirm career data and portfolios. Candidates own their information, and, subsequently, their career pathways, an important factor in today’s labor market from the worker perspective. The speed in which blockchain presents a match and a connection can dwarf that of traditional hiring. Platforms like the non-profit Velocity Network and innovative solution Braintrust are helping businesses reboot their talent strategies.
• AI moves firmly into the talent acquisition arena. Artificial intelligence has become, particularly over the past several years, a formidable means of visualizing workforce data through dynamic analytics. Predictive analytics and scenario-building capabilities within workforce management suites and VMS platforms have changed the way HR, procurement, and talent acquisition leaders access total talent intelligence and supercharge their talent-decision making with that data. However, 2023 is the year of AI in talent acquisition; it is imperative that businesses drive real workforce scalability and boost their skills-oriented approach by leveraging artificial intelligence to better validate candidate profiles, enhance skillset-to-job matching, and improve the overall hiring process. Talent acquisition is entering a new, AI-charged era in part because of the advanced technology that can seamlessly streamline the ways businesses not only engage candidates, but also the ways they catalyze the skills-matching experience. Platforms like Opptly represent this exciting new generation of technology, along with solutions like Phenom, Gem, and Gloat, as well as Magnit and both its ENGAGE Talent tool and total talent intelligence offering. Too, solutions such as Glider.ai (robust skills verification and candidate assessment), Fuel50 (recalibrating workforce intelligence), and HiredScore (next-generation, proactive talent-fueled AI) will also disrupt the concept of AI in talent acquisition.

One other factor that could play a pivotal role in the evolution of the skills-based organization is direct sourcing and its impact on digital recruitment, an arena that is founded on the ability to better match open positions with top-tier skillsets. Today’s direct sourcing platforms are a key cog in developing a skills-oriented approach towards talent acquisition, with solutions such as WorkLLama, whose AI-fueled recruitment tools revolutionize candidate collaboration and boost talent acquisition strategies, and LiveHire, whose end-to-end recruitment and direct sourcing technology facilitates a dynamic and holistic approach towards total talent management,

The post The Elements That Will Shape the Skills-Based Organization appeared first on The Future of Work Exchange.