Why Should You Include Badges In Your Learning Academy?
During the last period, many organizations started to develop learning spaces for internal use or external customers, providing not just online courses but an entire personalized learning experience, either as a support to their developed products or as a service with various trainings and demos. There are many online platforms that can help you create your own learning academy but the most important is to discover the proper one for your needs and specificities.
Developing a learning academy can be a good move for various reasons, depending on your main goals. Here are some key reasons for establishing a learning academy:
- Skills development for your partners and employees
- Creating complete learning experiences for your audiences
- Partner and employee retention
- Creating customized learning catalogs and demonstrations
- Scalability
- Community impact
As such, incorporating badges into your learning academy can transform the entire learning experience by making it more interactive, personalized, and rewarding. Let’s start!
The Value Of Adding Badges In Your Learning Academy
Adding badges to your learning academy may bring various benefits, but the following may be the most prominent ones, helping you and your audience directly and indirectly.
1. Learning Gamification
Including badges in the learning process and your learning academy will make learning more engaging, particularly for learners who enjoy challenges as well as competition. Gamification can lead to improved learning outcomes as learners are more likely to stay engaged with the course material. This can also motivate the learner to learn and achieve more!
2. Competence Validation For Your Learners
Earning a badge involves demonstrating a specific skill. This provides learners with a demonstration of their abilities, validating their skills. It also helps the social media community identify potential job candidates whose support or services they might need. Badges can also help learners become more visible, trusted professionals in their field as well as more prepared in their industries and job roles.
3. Increased Visibility For Your Learning Academy Product And Company
By sharing your learners’ badges on social media, your company will become more visible across various communities as you can personalize your academy badges as per your preference. You can create the message your learners will receive with the badge, once the course is completed—a message to encourage them to share the badge on social media immediately after they get it.
Badges serve as verifiable credentials that learners can display on their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, or other professional platforms. This recognition can enhance their credibility and marketability in their respective fields.
4. Attractiveness To Other Potential Learners/Partners
A well-implemented badge system can make a learning academy more attractive to potential partners by checking and identifying more about your academy and services. The opportunity to earn a recognized badge can be a strong selling point, helping individuals who are looking for other similar services or training.
We can look at this in two ways: either potential partners can become interested in your academy’s training services and purchase them, or they might be interested in having the same type of service within their own company. So, you can think of having an L&D department that develops academy courses and the entire learning experience, along with having the opportunity to develop learning academies for other potential customers.
5. Company Credibility
By issuing badges that recognize specific skills and achievements, your company signals a commitment to high standards and professional development. Over time, as more learners earn these badges, the consistent quality associated with them enhances the company’s reputation for delivering valuable and credible learning experiences.
This will also contribute to a strong and credible reputation for your company in the industry, making your badges a respected symbol of quality, proficiency, and trust.
Conclusion
Badges can become a powerful tool that benefits both learning academies and learners in meaningful ways. For learning academies, badges enhance engagement, driving higher completion rates and fostering a more interactive learning environment. They also serve as a marker of quality, attracting new partners by showcasing the academy’s commitment to excellence, professionalism, and complete, interactive, and personalized learning journeys for their learners, support, and valuable resources.
For learners, badges come as a recognition of their achievements/work and learning experiences, boosting motivation and offering a sense of accomplishment. They can participate in personalized learning pathways, allowing them to focus on areas that matter most to them, helping improve their skills, and becoming more visible as trusted professionals by sharing the badges on various platforms.
