OPEN BADGES, BIG DATA & ANALYTICS: A CURATIVE APPROACH INTEGRATING 21ST CENTURY SKILLS INTO THE MODERN WORKFORCE

INTRODUCTION

Overview:
Becoming a successful 21st Century citizen requires 21st Century skills. Industries such as technology, health sciences and supply chain logistics, require basic skills such as communication and collaboration, to more complex demands such as digital and web literacies, creativity, and innovation. Open badging helps address these requirements by allowing individuals to achieve these skills via project or evidence based learning, while analytics and big data provide valuable insight into how individual skills are most efficiently addressed for a given set of learner attributes.

Utilizing Big Data to Drive Individual Analytics:
As individuals continue to contribute more and more data through social media, the Internet of Things, and the rapid movement toward the quantified-self enabled via wearable computing, Big Data principles can be applied to assist individuals in learning more about themselves and their skills by analyzing their posts, comments, responses (to and from), tweets, clickstreams, and influence.
Utilizing Big Data, open badging programs can search thousands of employers real time to see what skills are needed and fill the gap with standard and ad-hoc offerings. Via analytics, individual employers can determine which 21st century skills that potential employees lack and which can be addressed quickly and efficiently through interventions, such as open badging programs, and which deficiencies predict a likely poor fit for the position independent of intervention.

Methods:
Identifying the 21st Century Skills that Truly Matter in the Workplace:
A review of the related literature identified the key areas that employers feel are lacking in both existing employees and those entering the workforce. Once these areas were identified and validated, each was broken down into competency maps with individual competencies characterized by observable and measurable behaviors with well-defined proficiency levels.

Refining the Competency Maps and Designing the Open Badging Solution:
After drafting the core competency maps from industry requirements, a more exhaustive mapping exercise was undertaken to maximize the applicability of the resulting badging programs across audiences from youth through workforce.

Putting the Self-Diagnosis into Action:
Individuals seeking 21st Century skills enter in their log-in information for all of their social networking and texting applications. The data is tracked via a web-services driven set of applications that constantly store, parse, and analyze inputs and compare them against expert models of appropriate levels of 21st Century skills. The dashboard app points out strengths and weaknesses and recommends the appropriate badging programs for improving their skills.

Conclusions:
Empowering individuals to understand more about their own strengths and weaknesses through Big Data driven analytics allows for personalized remediation and highly focused preparation for the workforce.

21st Century skills are not the only barrier in closing the skills gap. Industry specific skills validated through similar open badging programs can address other emerging gaps such as digital literacy, problem solving skills, sales skills, and supply chain management skills.