NSF ATE Badging ProSkills

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This NSF-funded project develops digital badges for both faculty and students to help community college students develop, demonstrate and showcase 
professional skills employers value.  

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About the Project

The NSF-funded Badging ProSkills project designs a microcredentialing program to expand the capacity of community colleges to develop and document students’ essential professional skills, like communication, teamwork, adapting to workplace expectations, and lifelong learning. These badges provide verified, shareable evidence of skills valued by employers and complement traditional credentials. In addition, the project supports faculty to develop students’ professional skills through their classroom instruction, earning badges for their use of these teaching practices. By combining research and implementation, the project explores how microcredentialing and badges can strengthen students’ career readiness and better connect education with workforce needs. Ultimately, it aims to create scalable, evidence-based approaches that help community colleges prepare diverse students for success in today’s job market.

Key Activities

The NSF-funded Badging ProSkills project aims to strengthen how community colleges prepare students for the workforce by making professional skills more intentional, visible, and measurable through digital badges. Led by SRI in partnership with Evergreen Valley College (EVC), the project addresses a key gap: while employers value professional skills like communication and teamwork, these are often not explicitly taught or demonstrated in traditional coursework. 

The project centers on the development of a digital badging system and includes a formative evaluation and mixed-methods study examining how participation influences instructor confidence to teach such skills and student outcomes, building on SRI’s prior research in employability skills. The project aims to improve the capacity of community colleges to develop and document students’ professional skills of communication, teamwork, lifelong learning, and adapting to workplace expectations. The badging program aims to support faculty to embed instruction to develop these skills into courses and to enable students to complete activities, reflect on these skills, and describe their skills in job interviews. The resulting digital badges provide verified, shareable evidence of skills for both faculty and students.

Badging ProSkills supports distinct tracks for faculty and student development. Instructors at Evergreen Valley College can earn badges for implementing teaching practices that foster professional skills, helping integrate career readiness into everyday instruction while building institutional capacity. Students can opt to earn badges in courses integrating professional skills practice activities, uploading personal reflections on their experiences and learning to the badging system to obtain badges that complement traditional credentials used in job searches and professional networking. 

The use of microcredentials in postsecondary education has expanded nationwide in the past decade, with all 50 states having higher education institutions offering micro-credentials. The Badging ProSkills project contributes to research into microcredentials through a formative evaluation and mixed-methods study that examine how to design badging to motivate instructor and student participation, and to understand how badging participation influences instructor teaching confidence and student outcomes. 

Finally, the project draws on advisory expertise from other community college experts and employers. The goal is to create an approach that has the potential to scale in diverse community college contexts and appeal to a broad sample of employers.

Associated fields of research