Despite being the most popular way to prove skills and knowledge in most industries, traditional paper certificates have never been a good fit for online learning. In fact, with digital credentials on the rise, they are now becoming obsolete. Paper certificates are expensive to produce and ship; difficult to keep safe from loss or damage; not verifiable or portable; and as an offline document, they’re not connected with any data or personal information (like a LinkedIn profile) that would make them useful to issuers or recipients. Therefore, smart certificates such as digital badges and certificates are getting popular among people.
What are Digital Badges & Certificates?
Digital badges and certificates are digital credentials that are becoming the gold standard for verifying qualifications, training, skills, and competencies.
Digital credentials are a new generation of technology-enabled credentials that provide proof of an individual’s professional achievements and qualifications. They include key elements such as:
- Date of issue, including the exact time when the credential was issued,
- Details on the event, including the earning criteria and skill descriptions,
- The name of the institution or organization issuing the credential,
- The name of the recipient,
- Institution’s logo or personalized seal,
- A precise URL where each credential can be verified online to prove its authenticity,
- A unique serial number and QR code for each digital credential.
What Is a Digital Badge?
A digital badge is a digital representation of a skill you’ve earned, linked to evidence that verifies your achievement. Badge earners can tell the story of their learning journey by detailing how they learned a skill and providing proof of it.
Badges are a simple, visual ways to understand, share, and celebrate achievements. Badges don’t have to be complicated, but they do have to be meaningful.
Digital badges are a way to recognise the skills, achievements, and qualifications of individuals. Digital badges are open-source badges that an organisation or individual issues. They can be embedded with additional metadata, which makes them verifiable, storable, and shareable.
What is a Digital Certificate?
Digital certificates provide a different view on learning and training. With digital certificates you can empower yourself, your students, or your employees. They make education and certification simple, clear, and credible for everyone.
Digital certificates are paperless documents that are uniquely verifiable. They represent real world achievements, whether in education or the workforce. Digital certificates are digital native; they live online and are accessible anywhere in the world to anyone with an internet connection. This makes them ideal for today’s global workplace, where degrees, diplomas, certifications, and licenses must be portable, verifiable, and trustworthy across borders and time zones.
What’s The Value for You?
Let’s face it. CVs are a thing of the past. They are impersonal, 2-dimensional, and rarely tell the full story of a person’s skills and accomplishments.
In this new digitalized world, employers need more than just a CV to find the right hires. They also need to know how skilled potential candidates are and whether they have the potential to grow in their roles.
Digital badges and certificates are digital representations of knowledge, skills, and achievements. Like their physical counterparts, they allow an individual to prove competence in a particular area of expertise.
Badges and certificates also play a crucial role in helping learners connect with job opportunities through their networks. This is because when learners earn a digital badge from an organization, they earn much more than just a digital credential. They also get access to information about how they learned that skill, what they were able to accomplish as part of their learning journey and what evidence they provided to prove that they have indeed acquired that skill.
The Open Badge 2.0 standard allows you to share your credentials with a greater audience easily. You can share via email, add them to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn or display them on your website, which is perfect if you’re a freelancer.
Advantages of Digital Badges & Certificates over Traditional Ones
When you apply for a job, you need to show your academic certificates, such as diplomas, to prove your education degree, and you need to show other documents to prove your knowledge, skills, and competencies. However, even if you have done a lot of online courses, education, training and so on, you may not have any documents to prove them.
Or, if you have conducted webinars or training sessions on the internet as a teacher/trainer and want to give certificates or badges to the participants, how will you do that?
Yes, we all are familiar with traditional paper documents. Companies, institutes and even individuals issue them. But these certificates do not carry much information, they do not prove much and they can be easily faked.
But what if we can make these paper documents more flexible, convenient, and valuable for everyone, like students, job seekers, teachers, and companies? Digital credentials are different from traditional ones in how they are digital, shareable, and verifiable anytime, anywhere. They carry more information than conventional credentials and prove knowledge, skills, competencies, and achievements.
Digital certificates and digital badges offer a wide range of benefits over traditional certificates and badges:
- Easy to issue and send your recipients automatically,
- Can be verified by anyone in the world just by scanning the certificate or badge with their smartphone,
- Offer interactive elements that can include videos, images, links, social media buttons and more,
- Can be customized with your own design,
- Can be sent to multiple recipients at once,
- No limit on the number of credentials you can issue or store,
- Enables you to save time and money over paper-based alternatives,
- They are secured and can’t be copied,
- They are shareable on CVs, websites, social media and so on,
- They have no limits; they can be issued by companies, educational institutions and even individuals who want to recognize someone’s skills or work in an official capacity.
Why Issue Smart Certificates/Badges?
Digital badges & certificates can be issued by any organization – schools, universities, companies, or non-profits.
While the concept of digital credentials is relatively new, their demand has been growing steadily as more and more organizations realize that they can help boost their credentialing operations.
Benefits for badge & certificate earners:
Digital badges & certificates can include many different types of information about the learner’s achievement (e.g., the grade earned, date of completion) and about the achievement itself (e.g., title, description). This information is embedded directly into the digital credential itself.
Digital credentials provide a rich source of data about learners’ education history, such as when they earned it, where they earned it from and what they learned. With this information, job applicants can better understand their own skillset as well as explain to potential employers how they became qualified for a particular role. Digital certificates and digital badges can also be presented on social media or in job applications with the click of a button.
Benefits for teachers, trainers, and academics:
For teachers and trainers, digital credentials are a new way to acknowledge the academic achievements, skills, and learning progress of their students/trainees. This method is faster, cheaper, and more transparent than traditional methods.
Benefits for recruiters and companies:
Digital credentials are a new way to prove skills, achievements, education, and talent. They are essential for recruiters and employers, educational institutions and corporations.
The main feature of digital credentials is that anyone can verify online in real time. This means that potential employers can quickly check whether a candidate is telling the truth about their educational background and achievements. Employers get a better idea of who they are hiring and whether they are qualified for the position.
Digital credentials are also a more convenient option, as they can be instantly verified online by employers and recruiters. This helps legitimise the credential’s validity before undertaking any further verification activities. They can also easily be scanned into an applicant tracking system (ATS).
How Can You Issue Smart Certificates and Digital Badges?
We are living in a digital era, where everything is getting digitized, and the education sector is no different. Everything from the way we learn to the way we share knowledge and learning is changing, and it has been a positive change so far. Traditional paper-based credentials are becoming obsolete with digital badges and certificates taking over.
The main idea behind a digital credential is that the recipient of the credential can prove ownership by presenting a unique URL or QR code:
- They allow you to set up an individual URL or QR code for each student/recipient,
- They allow you to set up an individual badge for each student/recipient,
- They give anyone who viewed the full credential details about how it was earned,
Are you representing a university, a company, an organization or just a freelancer providing educational courses or another kind of training? Sertifier allows you to issue digital credentials that contain information about your educational programs, classes, conferences or other public events as well as information about their recipients – participants.
For the recipients, digital credentials can provide the following information and more:
- Name,
- Achievement,
- Issuer organization,
- Date of issue,
- Proof of validity,
- Earning criteria,
- Related skills.
How Sertifier Can Help?
In order to keep up with the pace of change, Sertifier was established in 2016 with the goal to make issuing and managing credentials easier. Sertifier has been constantly improving since then!
Sertifier is a cloud-based platform that helps you issue digital badges and certificates. Sertifier provides a platform for issuing, verifying and displaying digital credentials. With Sertifier, you can easily create badges and certificates for your students, employees or other individuals that you want to award with digital credentials.
Issuing digital badges & certificates is also super easy with Sertifier’s beautifully designed templates. However, if you are looking for something else, you can easily design your own template that you think fits better for your company or organization.
What Makes Sertifier Different From Other Tools?
- Sertifier’s mission is to provide an easy way for instructors, trainers, teachers and organizations to issue digital credentials to their recipients in just minutes without having any technical skills. We offer a simple interface with plenty of options so everyone can find something suitable for them!
- We know how it feels to issue thousands of credentials manually, so we automated it for you.
- With Sertifier you will never have to worry about security because all issued credentials are secured and verifiable.
- Using Sertifier can also help you build an audience by providing an easy way to share your digital credentials on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Digital credentials issued by Sertifier will be valid forever! You don’t have to be our user as an issuer organization for your certificates/badges to be valid.
- Sertifier offers several purchasing plans that offer different features.
Our values are:
- Simple sign-up process, so you don’t need to fill out forms for hours to get started.
- A clean and simple interface so that you can focus more on content and less on design.
- Effortless credential design so that you can save time.
- Customization of details so that you can set custom details for each recipient.
Can I use Sertifier for free? Are there any limitations?
Yes! You can sign up now and start your 7-days free trial which enables you to use all of Sertifier’s Pro features. After your trial ends, you will be able to create digital credentials for free for up to 20 recipients. You can start using Sertifier for free now and upgrade when you need it.
