July 20, 2018

Badging Essential Skills for Transitions (B.E.S.T.):

Aligning College Experiences with Career-Ready Skills at the University System of Maryland

During this time of disruptive change in higher education, public colleges and universities are being challenged to demonstrate the value of their degrees and credentials, and to produce evidence of return on investment amid budget constraints and the changing student population. As part of a broad academic transformation platform, the University System of Maryland’s Kirwan Center is addressing a critical issue related to the value of higher education: employer perceptions that college graduates lack career-ready skills needed for workplace success.

Surveys consistently reveal employer concern that college graduates lack career-ready skills such as collaboration, communication, and problem solving. While this is likely true for some, it is also likely that many more college graduates actually do possess the requisite career-ready skills but struggle to translate their curricular and co-curricular experiences into the specific competencies sought by employers.

In response, USM institutions have been working together since 2015 to design, develop, and explore the feasibility of digital badging. As an innovative way to validate and better communicate graduates’ career-ready skills to employers, the USM’s Badging Essential Skills for Transitions (B.E.S.T.) initiative focuses on Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, Globalism, Interculturalism, Leadership, Problem Solving, and Professionalism.

Badges “make visible and validate learning in both formal and informal settings, and hold the potential to help transform where and how learning is valued” (MacArthur Foundation, n.d.). And, because they are digital, badges include access to publicly viewable artifacts that not only validate learning, but also provide evidence of that learning, thus allowing employers more insight into what the badge earner did to achieve that badge. Additionally, being Open Badges means these badges that are digital and openly accessible can be shared through digital portfolios and social and professional networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

As a complement to traditional credentials, the B.E.S.T. badges have the potential to 1) motivate students to pursue opportunities that will help them become “career-ready,” 2) help students translate their experiences into the higher-order skills employers seek, and 3) differentiate students in a competitive marketplace.

B.E.S.T. is being led by Kirwan Center staff along with a working group comprised of faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators from across the participating institutions. Working together enables the group to:

• Identify common challenges faced by institutions in providing a quality education that will prepare students for careers and life-long learning;
• Develop an array of models for integrating curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities into badge earning pathways that focus explicitly on the development of career-ready skills;
• Better leverage relationships with regional employers and national leaders in the field to inform and support taking this effort to scale.

The B.E.S.T. badge-earning pathway design hallmarks created by the workgroup encourage students’ development of skills over time and application of their skills in multiple contexts. With the latter, badge earning pathways explicitly promote the transfer of skill across different activities, help build students’ facility in adapting skills to new contexts, and explicitly prepare them to transfer their skills into the workplace upon graduation.  We believe the B.E.S.T. initiative is well poised to support career and workforce transitions, bolster student success, and improve education and career planning.

Dr. MJ Bishop
Associate Vice Chancellor and Director
William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation
University System of Maryland
mjbishop@usmd.edu