Bunker Hill Community College Skill Badges

Program Description:

Started in Fall 2024, the Skill Badge program at Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) is an initiative of the school’s Humanities to Career (H2C) program. Supported by a grant from the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation, this program embeds and validates career-ready skills across the college’s humanities and liberal arts curriculum.  

The BHCC Skill Badge program was developed to address a challenging reality. Community college humanities and liberal arts majors have historically had a difficult time finishing their associate degree and translating coursework into positive career outcomes. With 2,500 of BHCC’s approximately 10,000 learners (25 percent) pursuing Humanities and Liberal Arts (HLA) majors, college leaders wanted to take action.

BHCC convened an Employer Advisory Board of representatives of HLA-aligned organizations and the broader labor market to determine the technical skills that should be embedded into HLA degrees. Employer feedback led the grant team to pivot to a focus on durable skills in designing the Skill Badges. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) also presents an opportunity by increasing the value of durable skills. Employers are beginning to realize that the human capabilities that make for high-functioning work environments—such as teamwork, cultural competence, and listening empathetically as a colleague explains a problem—cannot be replaced by technology.

The Skill Badge program adds to and redesigns the Humanities and Liberal Arts (HLA) offerings at BHCC to enhance and expand career preparation and future opportunities for HLA students coming out of a community college setting. A key factor in the college’s readiness to develop and offer the Skill Badge program to HLA learners was their ability to adapt preexisting programming to the HLA context:  a longstanding paid internship program called Learn and Earn, with placements in a variety of professions, including biotech and medical settings, cultural institutions, governmental entities, nonprofits, and small businesses; career advising redesigned to meet the needs of HLA learners; and their Ethnographies of Work program that teaches faculty basic ethnographic methods for observing people in their workplaces and provides academic content, including challenging theoretical and philosophical material about work, workplaces, and the skills required for career success.

The Skill Badge program involved HLA faculty members who collaborated actively and holistically with the grant leadership team and employer partners. The program is managed by a full-time Director who has previous BHCC experience working with employers in the office of Workforce and Economic Development. In addition, the program supports a full-time Coordinator position in the Internship Office, who solely focuses on connecting HLA learners with paid internship opportunities. Finally, the college’s leadership, including the President and Provost, actively champion the program, dedicating resources towards it and communicating its importance in regional and national settings.  

Grant funding was also used to compensate faculty to develop Skill Badges during the summer, and to refine their drafts with employer feedback throughout the semester. In the process, faculty also took ownership and saw the project through, greatly benefiting program development. 

How It Works: 

Faculty members build a Skill Badge in three steps: (1) identify the courses that include learning outcomes that connect to a specific durable skill; (2) identify at least three current job openings for associate degree graduates that mention the selected skill to verify industry relevance; and (3) incorporate employer feedback into a Skill Badge description that succinctly represents that skill in a language that students and employers can both recognize.  

Each Skill Badge is centered around an important durable skill identified by employers, including communication and collaboration; self-management and adaptability; leadership and influence; and cognitive and problem-solving skills. Once the Badges were designed by faculty based on existing course outcomes and skills listed in current job postings for entry level roles, they collaborated with employers to “validate” or confirm industry relevance of the skills by writing a brief endorsement letter. These employer-written Skill Validation Letters, integrated into the workshop experience, show learners how these skills are used in the workplace and help faculty understand how to prepare learners for the job market. 

Each Skill Badge involves learners participating in three credit-bearing courses that all integrate some aspects of the durable skill, as well as a workshop that brings them together with faculty and employers. These courses are entirely stackable within each HLA degree program, meaning that learners do not need to take courses that aren’t required by their major to earn a Skill Badge. 

At the faculty and employer co-designed workshop, the program Director engages learners in storytelling around the skills and help them brainstorm, explaining how this skill has come up in a class, in their work experience, or in a community event they participated in. Students can then bring that skill conversation to an interview, cover letter, or networking conversation. Once students attend and actively participate in this workshop, they receive a digital badge that can be shared on LinkedIn, a resume, or an email signature as a representation of this learning achievement. 

The program emphasizes to students that the skills integrated into the process are more important than the badge itself. The goal is to equip students with a tool to truly communicate what they have learned in the classroom and how it can apply in a work setting. 

Impact: 

Program leaders celebrate several types of successes in the program. First, it is rare to have either microcredential or skill badge programs in community college settings specifically geared toward humanities and liberal arts students. These majors are often seen as “transfer majors” with little demonstrable workplace relevance, and this program has begun to shirk that narrative. It is also exciting to see how completing the program becomes a small win toward degree completion for the learners – with three courses and the workshop under their belts in the process. Program leaders explain that, with many learners facing barriers to degree completion, “the badges are designed to happen early in a student’s degree program” – actively engaging the learner and creating a kind of snowball effect, from a small win early on, encouraging them to continue and to complete the program.  

Anecdotally, learners provide very positive feedback in the short-term, excited to talk about the skill and their experience in real-world settings; long-term, it’s expected that they will have the confidence to leverage their skill badge experience to apply to positions they might not have considered otherwise. Students who received the Skill Badge in the past year have shared that it helped them “break the ice” with employers and to have a tool to highlight the professional transferability of the skills learned in their courses, a conversation that some students have trouble approaching. Participants have also indicated both that they have confidence in their own developed skill, and all students who were surveyed after participating in a workshop and receiving a Skill Badge indicated they would recommend the Skill Badge experience to a friend.

Employers who attended BHCC career fairs and who did not serve on the program advisory board offered overwhelmingly positive feedback; specifically, if comparing resumes, they were more inclined to look deeper into the student who had a Skill Badge listed, to learn more about what the achievement represents. The program also recognizes that, nationwide, employers are not very aware of badges or other microcredentials as standalone representations of a candidate’s abilities. As a result, the program focuses on training students to discuss the skill itself and the experiences that allowed them to apply this skill, rather than relying only on the digital badge to represent their experience.

A challenge that this program has confronted is the need to build understanding among HLA faculty and learners that these degrees can lead to a variety of careers, combatting an assumption that these were primarily “transfer degrees.” Though the goal is for students to persist through their associate degree programs and to eventually complete a bachelor’s degree, the program represents that students need direct industry relevance for their coursework to feel motivated to continue in school while often balancing work, family, and other responsibilities. Through employer partnerships, faculty have also developed more of a shared language that helps to translate academic experiences into professionally relevant language in different industries. The Skill Badge program has opened the minds of learners and employers alike to the relevance of HLA studies to a wide range of careers.  

BHCC is working with Jobs for the Future to conduct a formal evaluation of the Skill Badge program. Program staff also plan to conduct focus group discussions with learners.