A Badge System is the set of badges issued by an Organization. This set can be made of single badges or badges which are linked to each-other in different ways. If exploited, this ability can become a powerful tool to:

• encourage learning or, more generally speaking, the pursuit of achieving results,
• enable badges’ recipients to offer themselves effectively in the job market
• identify the better-suited profiles to fulfill any professional role within the Company
• quickly identify people within associations and shared interests communities.

Your Company’s Badge System needs to come out of careful thinking and structured decisions which span from the choice of the looks to the issuing criteria, to the specifications regarding the steps adopted to evaluate, assign and deliver the badges.

A potential simple approach to the creation of a Badges System could consist in issuing a first batch of individual badges, of one or more of the above mentioned kinds (attendance certificates, formal training certificates, etc.). Then, a second step could be the identification of links between the badges, in order to create collections based either on a common theme, or on specific learning programs in which badges have to be earned in a specific order or in a specific quantity.

Paths built upon Open Badges can be used to describe the learning progress of the person.

When developing a new Badges System we need to ask ourselves:

• Could it be useful to link multiple single badges among themselves, so to create a path or a collection?
• Could it be good to partition a single badge in multiple smaller badges so to allow a more granular monitoring of one’s progresses and achievements?
• Could it be useful to structure multiple paths or collections to create a hierarchical structure in which a single badge would finally represent a whole series of achievements?
• Is it useful to differentiate badges’ style to highlight the various degrees of a specific learning path or different skills levels?