Continuous Professional Development represents a crucial element of modern employment, especially in the manufacturing and services sectors: whether it constitutes seminar attendance, refresher course completion or specific professional training, CPD is often a compulsory element required to perform certain mansions, onboard specific knowledge and generally advance careers. For this reason, it is desirable for CPD issuers and holders alike to be able to highlight its attainment in an effective way.
Today’s methods of achieving this, sadly, are still heavily manual, and rely on receiving paper certificates. Apart from the friction and time involved, such a method relies on the candidate keeping the paper certificate readily available to present to the prospective employer. This lies at odds with the very nature of CPD Certificates, which are micro-accreditations that may fade in and out of relevance at different points in an individual’s career, and thus are easily lost, forgotten or unwillingly neglected.
In order to overcome these hurdles and improve the efficiency of both the issuing and verification processes, The CPD Standards Office, the UK’s largest independent CPD accreditation provider, has partnered with Gradbase, the first UK company to digitise personal qualifications on the Blockchain. As part of this partnership, the Gradbase technology will help up to 800 CPD Certification Providers affiliated with The Office to issue their CPD certificates digitally and make them instantly verifiable all over the world with just the scan of a QR code.
Any prospective employer wishing to verify CPD will now no longer require the paper certificate, but can simply access the digital certificate from a CV or LinkedIn profile. But it doesn’t end there: as the information encoded on Blockchain is immutable and eternally stored, any certificate remains verifiable even in the circumstance whereby its issuer goes out of business.
The problem of forgetting whether a specific CPD certificate was attained is also removed: our Portfolio feature allows any learner to record and manage their lifelong Gradbase-issued CPD claims in one personal page, which is accessible to employers again with just a QR scan. Ultimately, we envisage a future where anyone’s CPD certificates can be accessed this way, streamlining talent procurement, KYC processes and facilitating job mobility.
The service is already live. If you are a member of The CPD Standards Office and wish to take part in this initiative, please contact Kirstie Walker at kirstie.walker@cpdstandards.com.
If you wish to know more about how Gradbase can help you issue your qualifications digitally and make your graduates/learners more employable, please contact Alberto De Capitani at alberto.de-capitani@gradba.se.
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