Certificates, badges & paths

Certification is how you recognize the people in your community. You can give certificates for completing a program, award badges for a skill or milestone, and combine several into a learning path. Everything you issue gets its own public page where anyone can check that it is real.

Where it lives

Open your community admin panel and choose Certification from the sidebar, under the Community group. On a phone, the sidebar opens from the menu button in the top bar.

The page has three tabs: Programs, Badges, and Paths. The Add button beside the title (New on a phone) follows the tab you're on: it opens the New program form on Programs, New badge on Badges, and New path on Paths.

Everything you create here belongs to your community. You don't need an event to get started; you can link a program to an event later.

The three things you can create

• A certification program is a course or achievement people earn a certificate for, such as "Foundations of Web Development". A program holds one or more certificate designs and the list of people who received one. This is what you'll create most often.
• A badge is a small image awarded for a skill, role or milestone. It is lighter than a certificate and needs no design work. You upload the artwork once and assign it to people.
• A learning path groups programs and badges into an ordered set of steps that members work through.

What people receive

When you issue a certificate or badge, each recipient gets a unique code and a public verification page at a link like gathin.com/certificate/<code> or gathin.com/badge/<code>. From there they can view it, download it, and add it to their LinkedIn profile. Their earned certificates and badges also show up on their Gathin profile.

In the app

In the app's organizer tools, open the People tab. The Certification row is under the Community group. There you can create and edit programs, badges and paths, assign badges, see holders, and send the emails. Designing and issuing certificates is only possible on the web.

The next articles cover creating a program, designing its certificate and issuing it.