About ASPIRE
Connecting learning outcomes with real job opportunities
Identify your skills and receive personalised recommendations
What are your aspirations?
To connect education and training with the skills that employers need, the goals of learning are translated into skill profiles. This involves comparing what is being taught to what employers are looking for by using information about job markets.
Skills profiling helps to overcome the divide between qualifications and practical abilities, so that employers can see who is the best fit for their needs. It also allows employers to distinguish between people who are learning while working and those who are not. This means that educators and trainers can provide more personalised learning both inside and outside of traditional classroom settings.
Personalised learning in 4 steps
1. Self reflect
Take a self-reflective test to identify your learning needs.
2. Learn
Gain knowledge and skills through training and education.
3. Earn
Receive digital open badges as proof of your skills and knowledge.
4. Transfer
Match your learning outcomes with employer labor market data and job opportunities.
Feasibility study
Our main objective in this feasibility study is to explore the usability of the Essential Skills Program with open badges in Europe across different contexts and cultures. With the aim of improving the availability of learning opportunities and professional learning centers, we intend to identify and develop talent in target groups using the open-badge program in two countries, the Netherlands and Croatia. The proposed project is a feasibility study on the potential to provide sustainable and high quality essential soft skills training to young adults, especially school dropouts, low-skilled and older workers by offering them an existing open online and offline skills training in Europe.
The prototype we are building potentially creates learning opportunities like a soft skills training that help learners identify and fill skill gaps to help them achieve their professional goals and provide them with personalized learning recommendations. These recommendations are based on skills data from an acquired digital credential and can be connected with the organizational skills culture and regional labor market data. The goal is to learn from the feedback and build a better prototype prior to build the real prototype and investing a significant amount of resources into the full development of the prototype.
In contradiction to “hard” skills, that are relatively easy to quantify by tests, official qualifications or specific professional certificates, “Soft” skills are more general and for them it is not-so-easy to estimate the level of competency. Examples of such soft skills are communicative skills, teamwork, creativity, entrepreneurial skills, time management, decision-making and so on. They are much more aligned with the personality of a candidate, his/her way of thinking, attitude and motivation.
What is important about these, is that they are more “transferable”, which means: useable in different jobs, which is the reason they are so useful. In the end, this makes you more flexible in terms of employability, which is very necessary for the current rapidly changing job market.
As soft skills are less referable to your qualifications and more personality-driven, it is important to consider what your soft skills are and how you might show evidence of them before you apply for a job. As they are harder to quantify, screening for soft skills is much more difficult. But our project is having a go at this!
Worldwide, open badges are becoming a popular way for motivating and rewarding learners for acquired skills. These skills can be obtained in diverse contexts, e.g. through formal, non-formal and informal learning.
Since the age/era of the analog world, badges are a visual representation of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. From Sheriffs, Boy or Girl Scouts, to PADI diving instructors. More recently badges in digital form are used to set goals, motivate behaviours and represent achievements in many computer games. This concept was an important element within “the gamification of learning”. Open Badges take that concept of digital badges further. It is an open and non-commercial technical standard created by Mozilla, which allows for the creation of verifiable, portable digital badges.
All the information (metadata) about skills and achievements, its recipient, the issuer, and any supporting evidence is irreversibly “baked” into a badge image file. Open Badges are shareable across the web, in online CVs or on social media.
These digital credentials are trustworthy and thus useful for job applications and education admission. The underlying infrastructure guarantees provenance and immutability. Many examples of successful implementation already exist, like the “badging” of MOOCS by the UK Open University, or that of their complete in-company training by IBM.