I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what’s on my mind this week:
With employers in the mix, can badges become more than a fad?
For years colleges have been mulling how to design badges that highlight the skills that make students more hireable. But these efforts have typically been missing a key ingredient: buy-in from employers.
A new project by the Education Design Lab could start to change that. It will involve employers who have committed to consider badges in their hiring of recent college graduates.
The project is small — up to six colleges paired with a local employer with no more than 300 students altogether — but nonetheless worth watching. That’s because until now, even among the “disrupt college” crowd, the buzz over badges has tended to overwhelm the reality. I saw this firsthand in December while moderating a panel discussion on alternative credentials at NY EdTech Week. I asked if any of the 100-plus people in the audience had ever hired someone based on their having a badge. No one had.
Do badges help students get hired?
When it comes to badges, even the Design Lab’s founder and director, Kathleen deLaski, acknowledges: “What we don’t have proof of yet is, Do they help students get hired?”
At the same time, with all the doubt about whether a college degree is a strong enough signal for employers, I recognize the potential value of badges that students from all sorts of institutions could use to prove their abilities in communication, critical thinking, resilience, and other so-called soft skills that employers claim to want. That’s especially true for badges developed and vetted by a recognized organization. Lord help us if every college just starts developing its own badges with their own criteria; that would just compound the static around an already-noisy signal.
Since 2015, the Design Lab, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., has developed eight 21st Century Skills Badges in collaboration with a dozen colleges. Now deLaski hopes to get beyond the realm where the supposed value of badges “is all anecdotal.” The idea is to test if students who earn and display badges get more interviews, get hired more quickly, or even get through the automated filters that so many employers now use in their early stages of their hiring.
Design lab signs up two colleges
The design lab, working with the digital-credential company Credly as a pro bono partner, has already signed up two colleges: Langston University and the University of Maine. It will choose up to four more after the August 25 deadline for applications. It’s seeking institutions “where students aren’t already highly networked,” deLaski says, and perhaps ones that are heavily online or adult-serving.
I’m interested that employers are now directly involved. So I spoke with David Pease, senior vice president and director of talent, diversity, and inclusion at Bangor Savings Bank, which is partnering with the University of Maine on the test run. He expects that badges will help the bank identify the strongest candidates from a pool of a thousand applicants for a handful of entry-level jobs. Candidates’ degrees, Pease said, “don’t necessarily tell me how driven they are or how they’re different from anybody else.” But the badges are like “putting a star on top of your degree,” he said. “It says: I have my degree. I’m ready to work.”
Of course, Pease is saying that after being briefed on how these badges will work. Most employers are still unfamiliar with them. And even true believers say that at this stage, badges are about as valuable to employers as LinkedIn endorsements — which is to say, not very.
Not widely understood
That’s not just me saying that. I heard the same from Shonn Colburn, who in June left an HR post at Spectrum Health, in western Michigan, to head up career services at Hope College. Despite his affection for badges, Colburn says, it could be a long time before a badge on a student’s resume becomes widely understood and valued by employers. Or maybe it never will. As he put it: “It could be a passing fad.”
Still, he plans to continue promoting badges at Hope. The college experimented with a Design Lab badge in critical thinking this spring and eventually awarded it to 17 out of 31 students who began the pilot program. One of those students, a history major, credits the badge with helping him land a job with an international health-care consulting company. The company “didn’t recognize it and say, ‘Oh, that’s a great thing,’ ” Colburn allowed. But once the student got into into his interview, “it was a conversation starter.”
