SRI is strengthening how community colleges prepare students for the workforce through digital badges that make professional skill development more intentional, visible, and measurable. In partnership with Evergreen Valley College in California, the Badging ProSkills project addresses a key gap: while employers value professional skills like communication and teamwork, these are often not explicitly taught or demonstrated in traditional college coursework.
Building on SRI’s prior research in employability skills, this NSF-funded 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 project is developing a digital badging system that supports faculty to embed professional skills development in their courses and students to complete skill-development activities, reflect on these skills, and learn to talk about them in job interviews. The resulting digital badges provide verified, shareable evidence of skills for both faculty and students. The project includes a formative evaluation and mixed-methods study examining how participation influences instructor confidence to teach such skills and student outcomes.
This work is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Principal Investigators: Louise Yarnall, PI and Anandita Krishnamachari, Co-PI
Populations: Adult learners
Services: Implementation researchProduct developmentResearch and evaluation