SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 01, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Udemy (Nasdaq: UDMY), a company dedicated to improving lives through learning, today proudly announced availability of its new Badging offering. The capabilities were introduced as part of an Integrated Skills Framework methodology designed to help organizations make sense of the complex skills landscape so that they can future-proof their workforce and keep pace with innovation. Leveraging Udemy solutions, organizations will be able to assess their current technical skills landscape, identify critical gaps, and supply employees with an effective way to acquire and validate skills mastery. In service of this, Udemy has also partnered with 1EdTech, to bring the Open Badges standard to its platform, enabling employees to focus on course content that aligns with the most in-demand technical certifications and verifiable badges like AWS, Azure, CompTIA and more.

Udemy’s new Badging offering along with the Integrated Skills Framework, serve as a powerful guide to help organizations effectively address three critical phases of skill-building: discovery, preparation and demonstration.

Discovery:

• A platform providing customers with key insights into the top technical skills needed in today’s workforce, including information on nearly 200 in-demand and verifiable technical badges.
• A sophisticated insights intelligence offering, enabling companies to keep track of growing trends, benchmark among industry peers and prioritize organization-wide skill-building initiatives.*

Preparation:

• A certification preparation center featuring curated learning paths and hands-on labs and assessments, enabling employees to keep pace with and stay ahead of change through instruction from real-world experts for sought after badges like AWS, Azure and CompTIA.
• A dedicated training dashboard to help employees track progress toward certification exams, determine readiness and access the information needed to register for the exam with the official badge issuer.

Demonstration:

• A seamless way for employees to import badges into the Udemy platform, signal new skills acquisition to employers, and celebrate the milestone with their peers and social networks.*
• A customer dashboard supplying managers and L&D leaders with critical insights into the skills their employees currently possess, have recently earned or still lack, as they seek to close skills gaps within their organization.*

*Features coming soon

The Integrated Skills Framework and the release of Udemy Badging capabilities come at a crucial time when management teams are navigating a complex macroeconomic environment and an unprecedented pace of innovation. As a result, the demand for specialized skills has surged, with an astonishing 87% of leaders reporting significant skills gaps within their organizations. This urgency is further underscored by experts predicting that over 85 million job positions could go unfilled by 2030. To address this critical challenge, 98% of executives are embracing a transformative shift toward a skills-based organizational model, recognizing the essential role of skill-building to successfully overcome future obstacles.

“One of the biggest challenges currently facing our enterprise customers is their inability to confidently assess and validate the technical skills landscape within their organization, ensuring their employees possess the necessary skills to help them achieve strategic business outcomes both today and in the future,” said Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury, President of Udemy Business. “We believe our Integrated Skills Framework will provide organizations with a digestible and holistic way to assess their current skills landscape so they can make informed business decisions about their learning and development needs. With the introduction of Udemy’s new Badging capabilities, organizations can now not only accelerate skills development, but also certification attainment and skills validation.”

Customers are already leveraging Udemy to support certification preparation with more than 10 million enrollments in IT certification training courses happening in the past year alone. For example, one customer, a large professional services organization, was able to upskill more than 4,500 employees to meet increasing client demands for cloud computing expertise, boasting an impressive 84% first-time pass rate thanks to Udemy’s customized learning paths.

“We’re thrilled to help leading organizations optimize their technical learning and development programs and enable them to make informed business decisions based on concrete skills insights,” said David Koehn, Vice President of Product at Udemy Business. “Through our Integrated Skills Framework and the introduction of Badging capabilities, businesses can measure impact not just by minutes learned but rather by the verifiable badges earned, ensuring their employees demonstrate skills mastery.”

Udemy’s certification preparation and Badging capabilities are available to subscription customers initially, with the certification preparation center becoming available to all Udemy learners in the coming months. To learn more about Udemy Badging and the Integrated Skills Framework, including a demo of new features, visit: https://blog.udemy.com/certification-badging-technical-skills/.

About Udemy
Udemy improves lives through learning by providing flexible, effective skill development to empower organizations and individuals. The Udemy marketplace platform, with thousands of up-to-date courses in dozens of languages, offers the tools learners, instructors and enterprises need to achieve their goals and reach their full potential. Millions of people learn on the Udemy platform from real-world experts in topics ranging from programming and data science to leadership and team building. Udemy Business enables employers to offer on-demand learning for all employees, immersive learning for tech teams and cohort learning for leaders. Udemy Business customers include Fender^Ⓡ, Glassdoor, On24, The World Bank and Volkswagen. Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco with hubs in Ankara and Istanbul, Türkiye; Austin, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Dublin, Ireland; Melbourne, Australia; and New Delhi, India.

Media Contact:
Ellen D. Kiehl
Director, Corporate Communications
press@udemy.com