Udemy announced the expansion of its Badging and Certification preparation offering, making it available to all learners through its Personal Plan subscription. Additionally, Udemy debuted new features for its Udemy Business customers, including curated content to help learners confidently prepare for third-party certification exams, track their progress through a personalized insights dashboard, and signal new skills acquisition to management. As a certified 1EdTech Open Badges v2.0 host, Udemy also enables customers to host newly earned badges and certifications within the Udemy Business platform.

New Badging and Certification preparation offerings available from June 20, 2024 include: Third-Party Certification Preparation: Udemy has seen ongoing demand for IT certification, with more than 10 million enrollments in IT certification training courses on its platform in the past year alone. This inspired the expansion of Third-Party Certification Preparation from Udemy Business to professional learners through Personal Plan. Now, more learners can access curated learning paths designed to support third-party certification preparation for exams administered by AWS, Azure, CompTIA, and many other issuers.

Badge Upload /Download: Udemy Business learners can use Badge Upload/Download to create a record of Open Badge achievements on its platform as a result of a partnership with 1EdTech. As the only 1EdTech Open Badges v2.0 Host in the category, Udemy enables organizations to verify employees? skills and expertise through sources supported by 1EdTech?s standards and verifiable metadata, ensuring learners and organizations are prioritizing in-demand skill sets.

Learners can also download or share these badges to socialize achievements with their broader networks. To date, Udemy Business has over 22,000 imported badges across over 1,300 organizations, signaling in-demand certification attainment and skills validation. Badge Insights: Udemy Business Enterprise customers now have access to a Badge Insights dashboard with a summary of all badges and certifications earned, as well as progress toward those achievements.

These dashboards provide organizations with valuable insights into the skills employees possess while identifying skills gaps that must still be addressed. Badge Insights empowers employers to focus on the most important learning objectives to support professional development, validate critical skills, award performance, and improve retention. Udemy?s expanded badging and certification preparation capabilities are essential to its Integrated Skills Framework, enabling individuals to validate and demonstrate skills proficiency faster while empowering organizations to evaluate professionals based on proven skill sets without relying solely on traditional measurements like work experience or college degrees.

Udemy is not only supporting this new approach to skills validation, but it?s driving industry standards as a contributing member of 1EdTech?s TrustEd Microcredential Coalition, defining benchmarks for mastery to combat varying quality and trust across badges and certifications.