Employers as Peers: Applying and Reviewing Digital Badges

Digital badges have been widely recognized as one of the topics of great discussion in higher education in recent years. The European Commission has presented its plan for a European approach to microcredentials with the intention of making these alternative credentials more widespread in the European education area by 2025. However, many potential stakeholders may not yet recognize or even know about digital badges. We investigated the current situation among Austrian employers, corporate recruiters, and headhunters through expert interviews. The interviews show that all the stakeholders mentioned have developed very specific points of view. We confirm that there is a widespread interest in badge use and awareness of potential benefits. Our interviews show that peer feedback from stakeholders supports the revision of current badges at multiple levels. These peer reviews should be formalized and published in a reusable and meaningful way. This leads to the conclusion that for these peer reviews to be helpful in badge development, there is an increasing demand for a platform or framework to bring structure and standardization to the growing amount of implicit and explicit feedback from HR experts.