Aligning skill and competency models with microcredentials - a conversation between Don Presant and Kul Sharma

Over the past few months Ibbaka has been working with Don Presant and his team at Learning Agents on how to align micro-credentials based on open badges with competency models. Learning Agents runs CanCred Factory where Canadian organizations go to develop and manage badges and CanCred Passport, where individuals can store and share badges for free.

For some more context on badges and micro-credentials check out Workforce development in the post-COVID world: Digital micro-credentials as a lever for transformation by David Porter and Kirk Perris at the Commonwealth of Learning.

We spoke with Don and Ibbaka’s Kul Sharma to get some insights into this work.

Ibbaka: People will want to know a bit about your background and why you got involved in this work.

Kul: I’m currently heading the Product Team at Ibbaka Performance and my primary job is to collect user input for product improvements and collaboration with our partners.

I wear many hats depending on the time and scope of the project, including but not limited to, testing, providing design input, guiding the project roadmap and backlog.

Ibbaka: What is it about this kind of work that makes you excited? What motivates you to do this work?

Kul: We are all about building community, so when Don came up with this project, the first thing I noticed is how we can help fresh college graduates in times like these. With this came a model that is specific to Canadian competencies in which they can earn badges by obtaining and achieving foundation skills.

Another part I like a lot is that we can help organizations with their sustainability initiatives. They can define goals based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and achieve the badges through the CanCred platform.

Ibbaka: Don, can you share something from your background and how you came to be doing this kind of work?

Don: I’m President of CanCred and we are a leading Canadian platform for micro-credentials and digital badges. I came to micro-credentials through the doorway of recognition of learning and eportfolios. I’ve been working with portfolios since 2004-2005.

My passion is helping people demonstrate what they know and can do, often through portfolios. For me, micro-credentials and digital badges are a bit like portfolios in miniature and they can be great nuggets of evidence in larger eportfolios. My focus is on that recognition value for the individual and also the value to employers who need to develop the skills of their workforce.

Ibbaka: Can you tell us a little bit more about badges?

Don: Our vehicle for this work is Open Badges, the leading standard for digital credentials, which can be formal micro-credentials and also informal digital badges. It’s a technology invented by Mozilla in 2011 that is now led by IMS Global, the international educational standards organization. IMS took over the Open Badges standard from Mozilla in 2017.

Open badges are about more than pretty pictures - it’s actually a documentation format for digital credentials. It has a standard set of fields that have to be completed in order to be portable across platforms. What’s unique is that the document text is embedded inside a digital image.

But the actual content of the credential is flexible. So of course you need more than technology to really support portability and transfer - you need shared approaches to the content and meaning of credentials, which takes you into the social domain and existing organizations and structures in our society.

For example, higher education institutions in Canada often like to distinguish micro-credentials versus “digital badges.” Micro-credentials are on the more formal end of the spectrum, closer to what institutions already know, with a set of characteristics that they are still building consensus on, such as industry relevance, competency-based learning, assessment rigour and so on. Toward the other end of the spectrum are informal “digital badges”, which are closer to what Mozilla originally envisioned when they invented open badges back in 2011: appreciative recognition of skills and achievement, participation and engagement, and so on.

So, badges can be used for a lot of different things, and not just by education institutions, but also professional and industry bodies, non-profits and community organizations and even large employers such as IBM. Given the flexibility of the medium, it’s important to be clear and transparent about how you’re using badges: different horses for different courses. That’s work in progress: flagging things like relevant skill, context and rigour

Ibbaka: When I hear about badges, I imagine badges that I earned as a Boy Scout. Is that a good way to be thinking about this?

Don: The Boy Scouts get a bum rap because you actually have to demonstrate those skills to earn those badges. Those are competency-based badges, similar to vocational skills badges in the military. Not many people know that the Boy Scouts actually began as a paramilitary organization in the Boer War. That said, if you say Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, it sounds like kid stuff, so I usually avoid mentioning that for adult audiences, or make sure I also mention military badges.

And of course they’re digital, not paper or cloth: they’re transparent, stackable, shareable and discoverable. They can be collected in digital wallets and portfolios and shared in different ways. Increasingly, they’re becoming machine-readable, discoverable and connectable.

Ibbaka: What led you to the idea of aligning badges with competency models? What was the motivation behind this work?

Don: There’s an element of the open badge standard, called the Alignment field, which is pretty simple: label, link and description. We’ve been using Alignment in different projects to link to things such as Canada’s Essential Skills and the international Core Humanitarian Competency Framework on a major project overseas.

The trouble with that is there is no standard method to make sure people are aligning in the same way. It’s up to you how you complete those three fields. There’s no central hub where people can link out and align badges consistently, so that you compare apples to apples and discover badges and skills more easily.

The Ontario government set up a funding program called Skills Catalyst and one of our clients, St. Lawrence College, asked for our support for their funding application. We suggested a development to enable the mapping of badges inside CanCred Factory to a shared external Alignment source in a way that could be robust and repeatable. The proposal was a proof of concept to pave the way for further development. CanCred supports this kind of linkage to a big EU database called ESCO and other platforms support similar linkages in the US, but as CanCred, we were looking for a more Canadian starting points, such as Canada’s Essential Skills. The Essential Skills are a combination of foundational and human skills that are used in varying proportions across the world of work. There is a huge value in the Essential Skills database which maps essential skills across hundreds of occupations in Canada. Now we can leverage that using CanCred and Ibbaka Talent.

Ibbaka: (Kul) From your side, what was it about Don’s proposal that made it interesting and exciting to you as a person from Ibbaka working with a competency model platform?

Kul: I think there are two parts to it. Don has already mentioned the first part. There are many competency models, but they are not Canadian. We want something that caters specifically to test markets. There are reading metrics to rate them, but there are no milestones that people can achieve in order to see how far they are in terms of sustainability initiatives or sustainability goals.

Our mapping of skills and competency can be used as currency to obtain badges, that is, milestones to achieve those badges on CanCred platforms. These are some attributes that excite me about this project.

Ibbaka: (Kul) Can you give us a technical explanation how the CanCred badge and platform and the Ibbaka competency platform have been connected?

Kul: The competency models are hosted on the Ibbaka platform using attributes from the CanCred platform such as jobs or competencies. You can search a competency model and attach these attributes as a requirement to your badge.

For example, for a sustainability goal let’s say these are the requirements you want to help remove poverty in one of the developing nations. The initiative that you’ve taken, is it aligned with that goal? You have achieved that goal to an extent. If you talk about essential employability skills which is also a competency model, you will see there are foundational skills.

As a fresh college graduate, I look for these foundational competencies and I try to achieve the skills and competencies, and to attach them on the badge.

Ibbaka: (Don) Can you explain how this works from the CanCred and the badge side?

Don: We’ve made it possible to connect directly to the Ibbaka Talent server from inside CanCred Factory. When St. Lawrence College is editing a badge they can pick Alignments from the Ibbaka Talent server as a seamless part of their workflow.

We’re starting with Essential Skills, but it will be easy to add other skills and frameworks and even remix them, as long as they’re open frameworks, licenced using Creative Commons.

Ibbaka: (Kul) From the competency model perspective, does this make competency models more valuable and useful to users?

Kul: In times like these, people and organizations often cushion their current talent taxonomy. There is a disruption in skills and competencies because of this pandemic. These models will help people and organizations to define the taxonomy first and then establish milestones to determine gaps. Gaps can be skills, competencies, and job roles that they don’t have currently listed in their organization. To earn a badge and get that sense of satisfaction knowing one has achieved something.

Ibbaka: Both of you have mentioned the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, what can you say about how goals play in this as opposed to competency?

Don: Although Alignment is often about skills frameworks, it doesn’t have to be restricted to skills. Other frameworks can add social meaning to the digital credential. For example, a number of credentialing organizations are aligning to industry standards. We’re going just a little further to include other frameworks such as content domains or society goals.

This was actually at the request of St. Lawrence College. They wanted to do this and the SDGs were already in the back of my mind as a great example of other kinds of alignment. Many organizations are now looking for ways to map their programs to the Sustainable Development Goals.

And it’s not just organizations wanting to do this, but also students and lifelong learners. I would call this mission-based learning. It provides meaning and purpose to your learning and you aren’t just a vessel for skills, but an autonomous human being with values and skills that you are developing and demonstrating as you work to solve the big problems that society faces..

In terms of the essential skills, we’ve done something really simple to begin with. We took the basic, “plain vanilla” essential skills framework, packaged by the Ontario government for the college system as the Ontario Essential Employability Skills (EES). Colleges in Ontario are required to map their programs to the EES, and we thought we would map micro-credentials to those as well.

It was an easy thing to do and made for a good proof of concept. In addition, Shopify is another of our clients and people may have heard that they have decided to make remote work their default, partly as a response to COVID-19, partly as a future-friendly way to work. They have developed a draft framework of remote workforce skills, which have a lot of convergence and overlap to those Essential Skills we’ve been talking about. They’re happy to share their framework. So what we’ve done is map the Shopify Remote Workforce Skills to the Ontario Essential Employability Skills, again very simply as a proof of concept.

We’re hopeful this can lead to other skills remixes, giving organizations the power and ability to set up their own skills frameworks that make the most sense for them and can evolve over time, rather than sitting there for years or even decades.

I’m very interested in the Ibbaka Talent roadmap and how it can support the roadmap for badges. Our solution right now is quite simple and meant to help people to take the first step. Down the road, there are some exciting things we can do that are going to be extremely useful for everyone, with these kinds of skills and attributes and the ability to creatively remix them with your great technology.

Ibbaka: (Kul) Where do you see this going in 2021? How can we take what’s been achieved and build on this into the coming year?

Kul: Ibbaka's vision is to provide a robust, dynamic competency environment, enabling our users to do various tasks such as defining jobs, staffing projects and finding talent gaps, altogether giving our users the freedom to express their own missions within the context of competency models and frameworks.

The learning should be based on their mission. A challenge would be to define or to control the degree of transferability and reusability of these models on the CanCred platform. Also, to include different attributes that users might be able to come up with while using either the CanCred or Ibbaka platform. It would be exciting for us and we are expecting to learn a lot from partners like Don working on these projects.

Ibbaka: (Don) How do you see this developing in 2021 and beyond? Both in terms of the ability to align badges with competency models, but also the larger world of badges and the role that they could play going forward?

Don: There has been a big take-up for micro-credentials and badges in Canada with a number of pilots being funded and lots of people talking about them.

So far it’s mostly been about digital course certificates. I’d say 95+% of micro-credentials are “complete the course, get the badge.” A simplistic web-based training approach can leave a lot of value on the table. Adding things like workplace application and “learning in the flow of life” alignments helps bring a social context dynamic that can be applied across a region, for example. We’re seeing more signs of this, as people find ways of making authentic assessment more scalable.

As another example, in the Ibbaka interview with Anglo American, Jennifer Rogers was talking about empowering their workers to define the current and future state of their skills and then putting support and recognition in place for them instead of just a course catalogue. Essentially, enabling employees to map their own career journeys to these frameworks and then navigate those journeys with guidance from the organization. That’s a pretty exciting vision and a lot more sustainable than top-down course programming.

And you can apply that model to whole future skills agenda in Canada and how we can move forward; where are those future skills and how can we define them in more agile ways and achieve them? Micro-credentials, micro-learning, micro-competencies and micro-assessments can be small pieces loosely connected in a larger ecosystem that can help us take a more organic approach to develop skills and capabilities.

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