Certifications and digital badges are not so different, but they each serve a specific purpose. Both certifications and badges require exams that are built to the same psychometric standard and quality. Both require skills and abilities to validate your expertise. Working together, they provide a recognition of your individual learning journey and attainment expertise that can lead to expanded capabilities and more opportunities.
Certifications represent a benchmark set of skills across a set of broad solutions, such as virtual networking, cloud solutions, delivering modern applications or securing the digital workspace. Certifications prove expertise across a set of products within these solutions that enable you to accelerate your cloud journey or transform networking, for example.
Digital badges prove expertise on a scope more targeted to specific products or programs, such as vSAN, VMware Cloud on AWS, or vSphere with Tanzu. They are narrower in scope and focus compared to the broader certifications.
As you earn both certifications and badges, you create your own individualized learning path, showing what you’ve attained and proving your own unique combination of expertise.
Think of it like you’re crossing a river. Your journey takes you across a set of stones to get to the other side. The boulders you step on as you cross the river represent the certifications; they are broader and bigger and everyone crossing the same river uses these same boulders.
The smaller stepping stones in between the boulders represent the digital badges; they are smaller, there can be more of them, and each person crossing the river decides which different ones to step on.
Each person’s path will be different, depending on which stepping stones (or badges) they choose. The combination of the certifications and digital badges you earn is unique and individual to you…it shows your specific expertise and path you have chosen.
We will continue to keep certifications up-to-date and cover the broad set of skills your career needs, as well as release new badges to help you expand your expertise and continue on your journey.
