Building skills-awareness, resilience and pathways to employment using Open Badges
Determining a positive career pathway can be challenging. There are many factors that can feed into this, including:
- Understanding we have skills (in the widest sense, including character attributes, hard skills, soft skills etc)
- Being able to articulate our skills
- Being aware of our intrinsic motivators at a skill micro level (e.g. what skills we enjoy using as we engage in an activity and how these could transfer to other contexts)
- Seeing how our skills can connect us to employment
Mozilla Discover Open Badges
The outcomes of a project I worked on with the Mozilla Open Badges team in early 2014, Discover Open Badges, demonstrated to me that micro-credentials such as Open Badges, can be used to aid the development of the above and help people to develop resilience in pursuing pathways to a job they would enjoy.
Open Badges allow us to evidence and communicate our skills, attributes and achievements online. The Discover Open Badges project was the first project of its kind to investigate the processes, requirements and opportunities presented by developing badge-based pathways to employment. The target audience was underprivileged youth in the USA, of secondary school age (roughly 12–18 years old), and the research that informed the project came from that perspective.
The project developed:
- A framework for helping underprivileged youth develop awareness of their skills, and resilience in pursuing a path to a job they would thrive in
- A prototype tool that would enable employers to set out badged pathways to jobs in their industry and learners to embark upon those pathways using badges
- Processes and suggestions for technical solutions that would allow the evidencing of certified skills, applied skills, as well as more intangible skills such as character attributes like curiosity
- Sample badges and open assessment criteria to evidence skills required to complete badge-based pathways
To develop the badge-based pathways to jobs, we worked backwards. We interviewed employees in the tech, care and hospitality industries, identified the skills and attributes that had led them to their jobs and charted these skills in terms of badgeable moments. We also interviewed the employers to check their requirements against their employees’ skills.
In the following sample of badges from the pathway of a Mozilla Senior Engineer and the architect of the Open Badge Infrastructure, we can see that Brian displays not only skills in programming languages and contributing to open source developments but that he enjoys creative writing, being a DJ and philosophy (Deep Thoughts badge). This mix of technical, creative and strategic thinking makes sense for someone working on tech projects that will transform how we do things. Through developing the architecture for the Open Badge Infrastructure Brian has made a significant contribution to a global paradigm shift in how we assess and recognise ability and aid employers and prospective employees get the right person for the right job.
Intrinsic motivation and resilience
Hindsight can help us see how our work and motivations have connected. When set out on a grid, as the Discover Open Badges prototype tool enabled, it can be easy to see what skills or interests, including less tangible skills or attributes, have been the links tying a career together. When embarking on a pathway to employment though, not everyone finds it easy to articulate their skills or identify the specific skills they enjoy using, which could lead to a positive career choice. For me, moving from a career starting in theatre and television to digital credentialing, it took me a long time to identify what specific skills had motivated me and connected these seemingly quite different realms of work. Among others, I have identified problem solving (of characters in a play in order to represent them on stage; considering how digital credentials could solve issues such as confidence and intrinsic motivation), design (learning; service; process; arts; thinking etc) and new horizons (traveling; innovations in tech) as key areas that inspire me.
Enjoying my work has also, I believe, helped me be resilient when encountering challenges in my working life, such as dealing with uncertainty around short term contracts, (which seem to go hand in hand with working on innovative projects). Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan posit that intrinsic motivation (doing something because it is enjoyed) is more likely to result in someone overcoming hurdles to engage in it, than extrinsic motivation (doing something purely to gain an external reward such as money or prestige). (They also argue that internalising extrinsic motivation (internalised regulation), by working hard to attain certain grades in order to have a choice of interesting careers, will have the same effect as intrinsic motivation).
If you had asked me when I was a child in primary school what inspired me or what I was good at (my intrinsic motivators), I would not have answered problem solving, design and new horizons. I would have hazarded a guess based on my life experience to that point, (which included drama and ballet classes), and stated a job-title I was aware of, such as being an actress or ballerina. I would not have been able to state the job I’m in now because it didn’t exist when I was at school. The skills I use in my job existed and I was developing them during my school years, both in and out of school, however, there was no mechanism to help me understand I had skills in a commodity context, e.g. that I could package up and use later on in life in return for paid employment. Nor that I could use the skills I demonstrated doing activities I enjoyed, to find a variety of jobs that would inspire me when I was older.
Applying lessons from the Mozilla Discover Open Badges project
For this reason, I am pleased to be currently investigating opportunities for trialing some of the thinking developed during the Discover Open Badges project. I am in talks with a Scottish Government funded skills agency and a local government council to help children develop awareness of their skills and opportunities from an early age. The Discover Open Badges project was aimed at young people of secondary school age but I believe the learning around using micro-credentials to develop skills awareness, intrinsic motivators and resilience could be applied from a much younger age, perhaps even from nursery school. The work would align with key national drivers for young people and employment in Scotland, such as supporting employability, family learning and wider achievement, as set out in Developing the Young Workforce - Scotland’s Youth Employment Strategy and How Good is Our School.
Putting it into practice — getting girls into tech
For me, the opportunities to use badges to help young people into careers they would enjoy, are huge. I hope to put this into practice in a network I run, Women in Tech, Scotland. The group brings together women to learn, network and discuss tech and advocates for better recognition and opportunities for women in tech. Part of what we hope to achieve, is to help girls see the many roles and industries digital tech is within and tech as a choice they could consider. Everything I’ve discussed above would be relevant to this. Badges could be used:
- At school to develop awareness of tech-related skills and to see the link between intrinsic motivators at a skill micro level to roles and jobs in tech
- To provide evidence of skills when transitioning into employment in tech
- To showcase contribution of women in tech (through badge evidence and evidence-based endorsements)
Badge-based pathways
Pathways can take different shapes but what the Discover Open Badges project demonstrated to me, is that if you can see the stepping stones to a job in terms of badges for skills, and you can identify skills you have on that pathway, you can see a clear connection from where you are now to a prospective job (including those you might not have thought of previously). If badges are added to a badge profile, this can help learners to identify what skills come up again and again. So, if you have numerous badges gained while engaging in the arts and traveling — for problem solving, design and innovation — a job in tech might be worth considering!
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If you are interested in reading more about some of the Discover Open Badges work, I blogged about it here, Discovering pathways and Horizon scanning — career discovery and possible selves. Also check the posts of colleagues, Lucas Blair, Tell us Your Story and Carla Casilli, Pathways Trilogy.
