Digital badges and verifiable credentials should have become the norm years ago.

Who wouldn’t prefer a secure, portable, digital record of their skills and achievements over a PDF certificate or a piece of paper? And yet, they haven’t. Not really. Not widely. Not meaningfully.

This isn’t just a matter of technical maturity. Sure, there have been missing standards, patchy infrastructure, and fragmented or locked-in ecosystems. But the core issue runs deeper: digital credentials, in their current form, don’t feel useful. Not to learners, not to educators and issuers, not to hiring orgs.

One recent study by Ilona Buchem found that students completing AI microcredentials were just as likely to want a PDF certificate as a digital badge. Think about that: even in forward-looking fields, the badge still lacks value. Why?

Here are three reasons why that’s the case — and what we must change – perhaps to invoke what Sanjay Sarma called a Cataclysm at the DCC summit.

A Single Badge Is Meaningless

Aside from a few legacy credentials like high school diplomas or national degrees, most achievements today are too small, too narrow, or too context-dependent to stand alone. One digital badge for one course? It’s hardly more informative than a PDF. Even if it’s cryptographically signed, even if it looks nicer on LinkedIn — it still doesn’t mean much by itself.

Digital badges make sense only when they are viewed as part of a whole: a full deck. Without context, without peers, without history, a badge is just a point in time.

No Place to Live

The original promise of a “badge backpack” — a digital home for all your learning records — never materialized. There’s still no consistent place where badges and credentials can be stored, displayed, shared, and used.

Instead, badges are scattered across different platforms, locked in proprietary systems, or poorly exported as PDFs. Learners forget where they are, lose access, or never even bother to open them. The idea of a personal skills wallet — portable, complete, private, and engaging — is still largely theoretical.

No Full Deck

Which leads to the biggest problem: you can’t build on what you don’t have.

Most existing credentials use outdated formats (like OpenBadges 2 or worse). Newer formats like OpenBadges 3 and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are much more powerful — offering alignment with trusted skills taxonomies, selective disclosure, endorsements, even blockchain anchoring. But here’s the catch: future digital wallets will only support these new standards.

So what happens when your new wallet is empty? When it doesn’t recognize anything you’ve earned before? Once again, the power of credentials is lost — unless we think bigger, and more inclusive.

What If We Had a Full Deck?

The magic of digital credentials isn’t in the badge itself. It’s in the system of meaning that emerges when all your badges, certificates, activities, endorsements, and learning pathways are connected — securely, intelligently, and beautifully.

With a complete picture, we can finally answer:
• What am I missing in order to…?
• Who am I, professionally?
• Who am I, compared to others?
• What should I do next?
• Where do I deepen or expand?
• Which opportunities best match my skills?

And even more: we can build nudging systems, job matching, learning paths, career journeys, lifelong learning maps. But only with a full deck.

What We Need to Do

Here’s how we could get there — and why UX is central.

1. Import the Past

Yes, some argue that skills expire after 2–3 years. But your history still matters. Even old or partial data can show patterns, show interests, highlight gaps, and contextualize new achievements. The wallet of the future must allow importing past credentials — PDFs, images, even self-declared records — with clear trust levels. Without this, we can’t build a meaningful starting point.

UX challenge: How do we make this feel valuable and frictionless?

2. Design the Wallet People Want to Use

Let’s be honest: most credential wallets feel like filing cabinets. But we need something closer to a Panini album or a digital garden — a living place that evolves with you. A tool you want to check, explore, and share. A product that feels rewarding, not regulatory.

UX challenge: How do we make learning portfolios as addictive as social media — but meaningful?

Gamification, visualization, suggestions, nudges, challenges, pathways: this is where product thinking and UX strategy matter most. Probably with the help of AI.

3. Make It Safe — and Sovereign

The full deck is sensitive. It holds our digital twin. It must feel radically secure, private, sovereign. The user must have full control — and trust that no one (not even the government) can flip a switch and erase their record.

UX challenge: How do we communicate safety, sovereignty, and transparency — without overwhelming users?

This is where self-sovereign identity (SSI) matters. But even more, it’s where user experience becomes the trust interface.

The Role of UX Strategy

This isn’t just about technology. It’s about building interfaces of meaning — where credentials become decisions, and records become stories. Whether you’re working on wallets, learning platforms, job portals, or HR tools, the opportunity is the same:

Build for the full deck, not the single badge.
Design for use, not just compliance.
Put people — not formats — at the center.

And that, ultimately, is a UX challenge.

Footnote1: Where This Comes From

This post is rooted in our work with digital identity and learning ecosystems — from the Badgau issuing infrastructure to the SkillWallet credential system to experimental applications like Emaji. But it’s also about what we believe good product strategy looks like: connecting dots across regulation, behavior, and design.

Footnote2: A note on the term “Full Deck”

As several peers (including the esteemed Franzi) have rightly pointed out: a full deck doesn’t mean collecting everything imaginable, but rather everything that’s relevant and meaningful. However, our research shows that many people don’t actually realize which parts of their knowledge or experience are valuable — or even in demand. Especially for those not actively seeking jobs, there’s often little awareness of what the market needs or where to find the right opportunities to grow. That’s why we still believe in using the term full deck — not to promote “more is better,” but to encourage visibility and relevance. It’s not about completeness for its own sake — it’s about equipping people to recognize and activate what they already have.