Canadian HR Reporter

April 2020 CAN

Canadian HR Reporter is the national journal of human resource management. It features the latest workplace news, HR best practices, employment law commentary and tools and tips for employers to get the most out of their workforce.

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www.hrreporter.com 13 reputation and trustworthiness." Micro-credentials indicating courses and competencies that have been successfully completed are also offered by the University of Calgary, in the form of badges. "On our badges platform, [students] log in with their UCalgary email address and it'll show any of these recognitions that they've accumulated over their career as students," says D'Arcy Norman, manager of technology integration at the institution. T he university established the program so students can prove, via a website, that they have achieved certain competencies. "Participants can earn these badges and then they can add it to their LinkedIn or their other social media platforms through the badges API (application programming interface) that Mozilla provided. [They are] a way to socialize what they're doing and let them provide almost like an e-portfolio to document their learning to a career in various contexts outside of a course or a program," says Norman. The Calgary program has granted 2,187 badges of the 108 they offer, which have been issued to 1,264 students we're putting on the blockchain are the proofs of the credentials, the profiles of the issuers and the inspectors. None of the personally identifiable information is stored on the blockchain... It's only stored on their mobile device." Digital diplomas offered by schools Digital credentialing is already available for some educational institutions, which now grant digital diplomas, such as McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. To verify the traditional paper diploma, an employer must actually get a copy or some form of verification from a university registrar or university functionary, says Ishwar Puri, dean of engineering at McMaster. "We use a blockchain platform in order to give degrees to students, diplomas to students. With this digital platform, the student has essentially a link that they can offer to an employer and that employer can verify that that student actually has that diploma degree." The data can be accessed after students download an app and show the app to someone or send the link, and the digital credential can be verified, says Puri. "Employers can trust those micro- credentials because of McMaster's "With this digital platform, the student has essentially a link that they can offer to an employer that the employer can verify." D'Arcy Norman, University of Calgary from 14 faculties and departments, says Norman, calling the implementation "wildly successful." "At first, we thought it would be 'Who cares about the badge?' And then we realized the grad students are extremely competitive and it was a thing they could add to their CV, their academics resumés. They were basically chomping at the bit to get the recognition. That was kind of surprisingly powerful in that they could brag to their peers that they've got it," he says. Reliable service? While the timing is right to offer such a service, especially for HR and recruitment, there's a learning curve and a confidence issue, says Barroll. "How much are you going to put into this digital credential without doing your own checking, in any case? Do you still have to verify it?" she says. "[It depends on] whether or not the verification of this digital credential is taking place by a trustworthy source that can't be tampered with or altered and is kept up to date. I think that will have a great deal to do with the confidence that employers and other interested parties that rely on those credentials will give to this new sort of innovation in on the digitization of the entire job-seeking process." For now, the 15 members of the network will be "driving the standards forward," says Cameron, and it is welcoming new members. "The foundation is a non-profit organi- zation, it's open to all organizations who are inspecting, managing processing records, and it's a very straightforward membership process. We're getting a lot of interest there." CHRR The Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary.

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