Off the bat, let me say that I am largely a supporter of the open badges infrastructure and the many interesting activities swirling around its development, from the recently announced DML competition to existing badging experiments to new forms of assessment via platforms and communities such as P2PU. Or, perhaps I should say that I am a supporter of experimentation and dialog around educational and scientific innovation, and badges seem to be inspiring such things, so that's good. My critique here is significantly ameliorated by the openness of the developing badge infrastructure and the well meaning passions of the people involved. I think there are many ways that things could yet evolve, and that many of the conditions necessary for these different evolutionary trajectories to occur are present, which is a great thing.

But I, and others (e.g., see here, and here, and here), have been struggling with some of the ramifications and claims about the potential for badges. Leaving aside the myriad concerns about the impact on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations for learning, the over-commodification of learning, and much else besides, I am focusing on one particular claim here: namely, it is often stated that badges will provide a mechanism for people to better capture the full range and richness of their knowledge and skills, and therefore will also provide a mechanism for employers to better identify and recruit suitable employees (and vice versa). At first blush, this seems quite a reasonable claim, and also sounds like a positive development. But I think this line of thinking is divorced from the reality of how potential employees and employers attempt to discover their interest, and perhaps need, for each other. Bear with me while I try to explain.

We can broadly classify all jobs into two categories: those that are well defined and require a discrete set of core knowledge and skills, versus those that are less well defined and provide opportunities for the responsibilities (of the position) as well as the employee to evolve over time. Obviously, this is a crude division, but I think most of us can quickly agree that a typical service-type position (e.g., a cashier at a supermarket, a teller at a bank, etc.) is probably going to fall into the first category, whereas more entrepreneurial and upper-level management positions will probably fall into the second category. People have argued that badges will help in both of the situations, though I suspect that those involved are typically only thinking about one situation or the other most of the time.

If you are trying to hire someone for the first type of position, then you are seeking someone with a very specific set of skills. This specificity makes it relatively easy for employers to seek employees with one or more specific certificates (or badges) that give assurances that those skills are in evidence. On the other hand, it will be impossible for any employer to stay on top of an ever-growing list of badges which certify the relevant skills, albeit each according to a different issuer and in some semi-unique manner. And employers will not have the time to review the credibility of the unique badges for every applicant for every open position. In the end, such employers are going to want the various badges signifying some skill area to be interchangeable; in other words, they are going to want to collapse the diversity of badges into some simple, summative credential, not dissimilar from the degree system we have today.

If you are trying to hire someone for the second type of position, then you probably have an idea of some of the key skills that will be required, but you are also probably counting on ultimately hiring someone who has other skills besides and may bring added value to the position as a result. In this case, though employers might be interested in people who can provide badges or other evidence of key skills, such evidence cannot be total and prescriptive since it is always possible to imagine someone who lacks any such certifications and yet is the best candidate for the job. Here again, the burden of evaluating the specific badge-claims made by applicants, and the relevance of any badge to the expected scope of work, is unreasonable. As with the first type of position, most employers will fall back to generalized evidence of thinking ability and recommendations. It is only in the final reviews of the top candidates that specific badges and skills-claims are likely to matter, and those can be easily conveyed in other ways.

Looking at things from an employee's perspective, a world of ubiquitous badges is even more problematic. The problem here is a temporal one. If you are seeking work, you can never be sure that you will get the position that seems ideal to you, whether you have the perfect badge suite on your CV or not. As the numbers of badges increase, the degree to which people can distinguish themselves from each other increases as well. But this specificity also means that you may find yourself less and less a perfect fit for any job, especially if the employers are seeking applicants with multiple, specific badges. This is not a new problem, as there has already been an explosion of offerings for certification in various fields, even in fuzzy spaces like “management skills”. If I, as an aspiring employee, obtain a certificate in project management from some issuer, but then a job is posted seeking applicants who have been certified by someone else, what should I do? Perhaps the employer will see the two certificates as essentially equivalent, but perhaps not. Will we see third-party agencies evolve that essentially certify that certain certifications are both valid and roughly equivalent? Or will there be a formal process whereby an applicant can try to prove that her existing certification is a suitable substitute for the requested version? These types of solutions exist already, and indeed these same pressures are largely responsible for the institutional degree structures we have today.

As an aspiring employee in a badge-ubiquitous world, it is hard to know how to proceed. The odds are incredibly low – and will get lower as more badges are issued – that the specific badge I obtain will turn out to be relevant to any position I seek. Perhaps I will decide which badges to pursue based on which badges are requested by companies that are hiring in my areas of interest. But this puts a big burden on me to do significant training for a position that I don't even have, and probably have no guarantee of getting. For employers, this situation can also lead to a sort of rigidity of expectations – if you can hire 'exactly' the right person for the job, why wouldn't you? Among the many reasons why this is wrong-headed, it presumes that the correct person can be completely described as the sum of the various badges she has acquired. Employers can certainly avoid being this narrow-minded in a badge-ubiquitous world, but I think the tendency is for the opposite to occur if the opportunity presents itself.

So what does this mean for the future of badges, education, and employment? I don't know the future any better than the next person, but one obvious solution is to re-order the usual sequence of events so that nearly all of the position-specific skills are obtained on the job. In other words, rather than telling people to go collect badges as a way of positioning themselves for possible employment, we should tell employers to build in time and expectations for employees to seek and obtain specific badges while on the job, presumably related to their current or prospective employment. This inversion of the sequence of events removes the uncertainty around the utility of badges that is an inescapable artifact of having more badges for more things issued by more agencies. Obviously, this is easier said than done.

Interestingly, I think this same trend will actually entrench employee interest in identifying people with somewhat “generic” degrees, much like college degrees function today. What employers want is evidence that you can think, learn new things, and work effectively in certain social and technological settings. The other details and specific skills can usually be obtained on the job. Right now, badges are mostly being discussed as the antithesis to such generic certifications. And maybe a “badge” as a substitute for a degree is the wrong frame. But this seems to me to be the real challenge before us: to the extent that “degrees” are both highly desirable and yet highly suspect as authentic indications of core skills, attitude, and aptitude, what sort of credential can take its place? I'm quite certain it will not simply be a collection of badges, though perhaps badges play some role. I'm also certain that e-portfolios, for-profit degree mills, and related efforts have not proven suited to the task. What else is there, or could there be?