What are digital badges?

In addition to your degree, studying at university offers a fantastic opportunity to participate in extra-curricular activities to enhance and develop skills, which are vital to further your personal development and employability. But what’s the point of participating in these activities if you’re not able to show what you’ve achieved with ease? Well, Your Students Union has an innovative solution for that! Let us introduce you to digital badges. 

Digital badges are a way to showcase the skills you’ve gained from the countless hours of extracurricular activities you’ve taken part in alongside your studies. These badges can be digitally displayed on your CV and Linkedin, and the best part is employers instantly recognise what they represent. There are two main types of badges: achievement badges and pathway badges. You can obtain these badges in various ways, for instance, you may get an achievement badge through attending a networking workshop, alongside gaining crucial knowledge about the purposes and methods of networking.  

Other ways of getting these badges include the development of specialist skills. For example, talking about your student experience in a student focus group will develop your public speaking skills, and in turn, give you a neat digital badge to showcase that.

Pathway badges are earned through accumulating a mix of achievement badges that lead to an overall award. Volunteering champion is one example pathway, which you can get by completing a series of volunteering activities in which you gain a string of badges.  

Now that you know what these badges are, get yourself involved in an activity to see what skills you can develop! If you’d like to get more information on the different badges and activities you can take part in to receive these, more information is available in the skills section on the Students' Union website. The SU also provides workshops and informational sessions about digital badges. Here, you can gain a deeper understanding of what these digital badges are and how you can most effectively utilise them once you receive your badges. These are super helpful if you have questions, or need any doubts cleared up – so be sure to keep an eye out on the website event section! 

Here are some examples of digital badges:

In addition, you can always get in touch with skills.su@coventry.ac.uk if you have anything specific you’d like to ask in mind. Remember, when you complete an activity and gain a skill – these badges are automatically given to you, there’s no need to apply or request one! 

Written by Sidhant Jaiswal (placement student)