Cultivating Careers: Digital Badges and Durable Skills in Ag Education

by Adam O’Neal--

Participating in the Agricultural Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) cohort has been a rewarding and instructive experience exploring ways to strengthen durable skills in graduates of agriculture programs. The numerous opportunities to network, share best practices, and explore new methods to improve teaching agriculture classes have been extremely valuable.

AWT4CL image
Image credit: Holgerhubbs, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Among the various projects undertaken as part of this program was the implementation of digital badges. In collaboration with colleagues in the Agriculture program at our institution, activities were implemented in three classes for students to earn digital badges for completing activities supporting mastery of 11 durable skills identified by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU). For another study including employability skills and career preparation generally, see this article by Parella, et al. (2023). For more information about this digital badges process, please see this 2025 NACTA conference presentation by the grant team.

For my class, I had activities for three of these skills:

I also managed the summary badge earned by students who completed the other 11, though only one student in my class accomplished this, as earlier badges were optional in other classes and no other student had completed the previous eight.

Suggested activities were provided by the grant team; and I used those, since I was executing this process for the first time. The semester I implemented the badges was Fall 2024, and I taught the course in a face-to-face modality for the first time. The course was normally taught in a synchronous online modality, though the prior year it was taught asynchronously with suboptimal results. I made the activities a required assignment—though low stakes in terms of points. The class did the activities during class time, including claiming the badges, so the participation rate was 100% for the badges I included.

Reflections by the students varied. While some felt that there was value in the activity and in finding ways to connect the experience to their professional lives, most felt the digital badges would be of marginal value to them professionally, despite being affiliated with Virginia Tech. The general consensus was that the students believed they were already competent in the skills these activities were intended to strengthen—something that the APLU research suggests is not accurate generally—and that they were skeptical that digital badges would make a difference in their career paths.

For the future of this practice, I plan to explore new versions of activities that will connect better with the students, perhaps by involving them in the process of creating those activities. This process has the potential to make students more self-aware of their status with respect to durable skills and aware of areas where they can improve. I would encourage any agriculture educator to consider similar activities as part of their courses.

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