Acclaim - Scrum Badges

@Axel, I appreciate your frankness.  I had no intention to be snippy and am trying to provide honest, transparent information.  Often the best way to force change is pressure from its clients which are you all, not Scrum.org.  If you put pressure on them and have them feel the need to evolve they may and that is what I am asking.

We are talking to Acclaim (Credly) at the same time and pressure from both sides is often valuable.  It is why you mostly see only very large vendors with very deep pockets supporting Acclaim since their acquisition.  We would love to support them if it were financially feasible for you and us. 

Wow! Long thread! I never knew this forum supported pagination!

I've been skim reading these replies as they've come up and generally not felt the need to reply, as I'm not interested in this particular feature request.

But as a user with Scrum.org certification, I'd like to acknowledge that I've always felt Scrum.org look after us certificate holders.

The examinations are high quality and reasonably priced (IMO), backed up by a wealth of resources in the form of blogs, this forum, webinars and other educational content.



We don't have to pay a subscription or renewal fee, there's a lot of transparency about what a certificate means and how many people have passed, and I've always had prompt and effective assistance when I've contacted the support team.

I also see a high level of responsiveness from Eric on this and other topics around certification.

I also agree, please make badges available to youracclaim.com. Otherwise how can one validate the certification.

@Pratik, one can easily validate the certification here: https://www.scrum.org/certification-list or using OpenBadges which is the open standard for certification validation.  Until Acclaim changes their model to support the open standard or not have a requirement that all certified must be paid for of a fee of $3-$5 USD even though less than 5% of our almost 500,000 certificate holders want it, we are not able to support Acclaim and have provided you many other ways for validation that wouldn't cost us and therefore you $1.5 million by using our validation system or OpenBadges which is the Open Standard.

I suggest that if you have an issue that you bring it to Acclaim to support the standard or find another model that doesn't charge for people getting no value.

Thank you

Why would somebody want to put a middle-man between direct Scrum.org verification and employee monitoring software of their employers`credentials and their LinkedIn profile/resume?

As is, your certification is linked directly to the Scrum.org website, which is authentication enough as opposed to a third-party site.

This thread has been live since 2018, and it's 2021 now. If users have consistently asked for this with so much ferocity, I think it would be a strategic blunder by Scrum.org to choose to ignore these voices. We know what happened to Microsoft Zune, Google Glass, Blackberry and Nokia. Yes, it would be embarrassing.

Your newsletter is far less important to certificate holders than the ability to display badges. You need a marketing refresh. Scrum.org features less and less on "Top Agile Certifications" articles online. It doesn't matter that it is so hard to get or that you have a compelling "Why Scrum.org" article on this page.

Feedback to the Scrum.org Product Owner:

1. Prioritize marketing efforts to make Scrum.org more recognizable (for its difficulty) within software and non-software communities.

2. Make displaying credentials on various credentialing websites easy to do.

3. Explain how you arrived at "less than 5% of our almost 500,000 certificate holders want it" comment. Just because they are silent, doesn't mean they are happy. Take a poll, and find out.

@suraj, thank you for your feedback.  We have surveyed people in the past, are spending lots of effort beyond just a newsletter on promoting Scrum.org and are continuing discussions with Credly on potential ability to support them and will continue those discussions and effort.  They also aren't the only game in town so we are evaluating lots of options.  Yes, this thread is old, but one input.  In short:

1.  That is a major focus for Scrum.org, however as part of our mission it is also to keep providing those who are certified abilities to keep learning.  Certification does NOT stop when you get a piece of paper.

2. This doesn't only rely on Scrum.org it relies on the various websites as not all support open standards which means money, development effort and constant change when they change APIs which would mean that potential renewal costs and increases for certificate holders. We don't want to pass extra costs on to you and are doing our diligence with the vendors to prevent that.

3.  We have done surveys and other things to evaluate this.

Thank you and more to come as we continue to look at options.

Please support Acclaim, as it's "de facto" a standard for a large number of people, even if it's not a open source standard. The debat of open source or not is quite an old fashion debat, totally useless for me, that brings nothing, same as Win/Linux, Apple/Android, etc. 

IMO, Empirism, would be using "de facto" standards, open source or not. Product value would be also to promote Scrum to large scale, and by using widely recognized tools.

@Damien it is being evaluated with everything else.  

Hi Eric,

People have been asking for Acclaim integration for over two years now, can we have some expectation of timescale?

Also, the Badgr (Open Badges) integration which is mentioned in this thread, and also in your support section, doesn’t work. Your support section has a link to Badgr’s support page which doesn’t exist.

Can someone please address this more urgently?

Many thanks,

Ian

@Ian 

1. We are discussing this with Acclaim and others and there are many options. Yes, there are some requests from our 500,000+ badge holders and the landscape continues to evolve.  We will have more information soon as we evaluate options and opportunities and we have many stakeholder requests and feedback that are being evaluated for the Assessment Team and this is high on the list of considerations. We also do not want to raise the cost of assessments for those who are taking the tests which is another consideration and an important part of that discussion and decision.
   
   A Product Owner has to evaluate not just 1 request, but many requests for many things, priorities and costs to refine their Product Backlog.  This is something that is on the Product Backlog, but a final technology decision is still being considered so giving you a timeframe for a release would do you a disservice. 
    
2. All of the links on the support page work, I believe that Badgr had a short outage this morning that you may have timed with your attempt to access it. 
   
    

I hope this provides you more detail on the thought process and it is not falling on deaf ears, it also isn't an simple solution especially with the potential of extreme cost additions that we do NOT want to pass on to certificate holders or force any renewal costs which would be unfair to most.

Didn't even know about this :)

Badgr seems to have issues importing when using the URL from the certificate found in the profile page though.

Thank you Daniel, our team is investigating this with the support team at Badgr and should have a resolution shortly.  Sounds like an API Spec may have changed.

We are in negotiations with Acclaim and hope to have more information shortly.

Huge news regarding Acclaim! Thanks for monitoring and replying to those in this thread over the years, Eric.

Any update here?

@Arash, we will update this thread as soon as we are able.  Conversations currently continue to progress.

Thanks @Eric!

See the good side, the import with Badgr has been fixed (at least for my case)!

+1 Acclaim.

I do believe that Scrum.org has the best Scrum Accreditation and training (from my experience). And I cherish my Scrum.org certifications. However, having the certifications displayed through Acclaim will further increase the legitimacy in my view. I would also pay more for this. But give me the option.

The current solution of having to supply my email address for a recruiter to check my credential standing on Scrum.org is not ideal. It is too inconvenient, and they don't have the time (they dont even spend 10 seconds scanning linkedIn profiles!). OPEN badges Badgr does not hold the same legitimacy as Acclaim for the very reason that it is OPEN.

I understand the argument by Scrum.org, regarding the open badging assumption, HOWEVER in the spirit of Scrum, listening to users, obtaining feedback, and evidence-based management (via this forum), I believe Scrum.org should challenge their fundamental assumption (that their certifications must comply with open digital backpacks) here as the numbers, and feedback by other users in this forum are clear .... It needs to be improved.

As a Scrum.org certification holder,

I want the Scrum.org certifications to be available on a reputable badging platform (e.g. Acclaim),

So that they are easily verifiable by recruiters/employers via LinkedIn when applying for (Scrum related) Jobs 

Please don't ask me to take this fight to Acclaim, as I believe the (strategic) responsibility here lies with Scrum.org. I am only trying to make Scrum.org better by sharing my perspective.

Kind Regards

Nathaniel

@Nathanial please see my prior comment "@Arash, we will update this thread as soon as we are able.  Conversations currently continue to progress."

@Eric, from the messages on this thread, I see that Scrum.org supports OpenBadges whereas Credly.com (YourAcclaim) may not. Would it be possible to: a) officially survey all Scrum.org certification holders on whether or not they'd like to have their Scrum.org certifications on Credly? and b) if Scrum.org certification holders would be willing to pay the extra $3-$5 to have their certification listed on Credly?

I say this because if you were to pass the $3-$5 cost to Scrum.org certification holders, perhaps, we might be okay in accepting a modest fee for an additional value that we see on such platforms. That way, we'd have a choice to add our Scrum.org certification to Credly (at an additional cost, such as an add-on) or other badge platforms. I think, with the Scrum.org users having the choice to have a value addition at an extra cost may not be as bad as it sounds.

@Ankit, please see my message on this thread from June 21st.

Hi all, today we announced our intent to support the Credly platform. You can learn more here.

Great news, can't wait to see my badge appear on credly profile.

I see Scrum.org badges now available on Credly (yay!), Very happy :)

This will make it easier to share my credentials with my networks (eg Linkedin Featured), employers, recruiters, and the wider Agile Communities.

Thank you

Nathaniel

Thanks a lot to all Scrum.org team for managing the partnership with Credly! It has been a long story/thread, and I guess we dont know everything about what was hapenning in the background, but thanks a lot for that.

Thanks for having kept the end users feedback in your value!

Very appreciated!

I have to say, I immediately accepted the Credly addition, and went to make and complete my profile, but we now lost the option to add the badges to Badgr.



The OpenBadges section in the popup for a certificate is gone. It is still possible to add badges to Badgr, but you have to do it by hand (which means editing the json code and hoping you did it correct), whereas the system worked and works very well. More options are better, especially when they already existed?



Can we be enlightened to the rationale of removing the OpenBadges option? Can it be brought back? People have used OpenBadges sites and given URLs, they may want to keep updating their profiles with new certifications?

Hello Mario,

Support for Open Badges is not removed it is enabled in a different way and actually much better to ensure compliance with the open standard.  You can find instructions in this Support Article: https://www.scrum.org/support/how-do-i-use-open-badges-display-my-assessment-certifications

Thank you,

Oh, I had seen the button at Credly, but totally dismissed it.



I can say: I tried it now, and it works flawlessly.

Thanks!