Learning is changing and also jobs and job requirements. We’re moving away from grades and degrees as the only record of competency because our learning environments and job descriptions are changing faster than our systems can follow. We need to take non-formal and informal learning seriously, in order to stay on top of current developments. Otherwise, we risk economic prosperity but also reinforcing existing inequalities, where socioeconomic background influences not only what learning opportunities people have, but also whose abilities get recognized.
A lot of projects work on that topic and demonstrate how change can be manifested through new approaches and mindsets. But a mindset shift on its own doesn’t get us there. You can convince every teacher, HR manager, and policymaker to think differently about competencies, and still have no way to actually capture, verify, and carry that competency data anywhere. Change needs a place to live: infrastructure that makes the new mindset practical, not just aspirational.
That’s what we’re building with OEB. Not a certificate generator but an infrastructure for a very different question: what if every person’s competencies were visible, portable, and theirs to use – no matter where those competencies came from?
The problem with how we currently see skills
Right now, most of what a person knows and can do stays invisible unless it happens to be documented on an official transcript or a formal job title. A young person who taught themselves to code through YouTube, an apprentice who developed strong problem-solving skills on the shop floor, a career-changer who picked up project management skills while organizing a community initiative — none of that shows up anywhere official.
That invisibility has a real cost. It means opportunity keeps flowing toward people who already had access to formal education and traditional career paths, and it means HR processes, job orientation, and hiring decisions keep relying on proxies instead of what someone can actually do.
Future Skills like problem-solving, adaptability, or collaboration are talked about constantly. What’s missing isn’t awareness of them, it’s a concrete, trustworthy way to make future skills visible and to develop them intentionally, regardless of someone’s educational or socioeconomic background.
That’s where OEB comes in. We understand it as an infrastructure for making learning and competencies visible, portable, compatible and actionable. To do that, OEB is built around three layers that work together as one system.
Three layers, one system
Layer 1 — Protocol & Standards. At the foundation sit open, non-proprietary standards: Open Badges 3.0 and ESCO, the EU’s taxonomy of skills, competences, and occupations. Open standards mean a competency documented in OEB isn’t locked into our platform. It can speak the same language as Berufenet, as ESCO, lightcast and, increasingly, as the EUDI Wallet, the EU’s digital identity infrastructure. No vendor lock-in, no silos.
Layer 2 — OEB Infrastructure. This is where issuing, verifying, and connecting competency data actually happens: The creation of credentials and the allocation of competences, the API, the badge server, the “wallet” logic. Universities, companies, online courses, apprenticeship programs, makerspaces, non-formal learning initiatives — all of them can plug into the same infrastructure and issue, collect and analyse credentials that are automatically comparable and connectable, because they all speak the same underlying standard. It is all these functions that enable skills to be integrated into a system in the first place. It’s the plumbing — invisible when it works, essential to everything above it.
Layer 3 — Competency Contexts. This is where the economic cases become concrete, because it’s already happening. The STARK-App uses Layer 2’s competency data to match young people with real job listings for job orientation. Turning a badge into a route toward an actual occupation, not just a line on a CV. Learning providers are implementing their own individual competency taxonomies on top of the same infrastructure and using them to deliver genuinely individualized learning paths, instead of running every learner through the same syllabus. SMEs are using badges to manage competency development in a way that fits their specific HR strategy — building internal skills pipelines without having to invent a competency framework from scratch. None of these organizations had to build their own competency infrastructure to get there. They plugged into the same standardized layer underneath, and got comparability, sensemaking, and trust — plus a direct line from “what someone can do” to “what the labor market needs”.
Why the standards layer matters
Without a shared standard, every one of the mentioned use cases would have still been valuable but stayed a silo. Fragmentation is the default outcome when everyone builds their own systems and taxonomy; interoperability is what turns isolated good ideas into a market that scales. Using the same standards a new currency for L&D is possible. And because OEB is built toward EUDI Wallet compatibility, that same competency data doesn’t stay locked inside any single company’s or provider’s system either. That’s the shift from “badge” to “infrastructure”: a credential that’s genuinely interoperable stops being a one-off certificate and becomes reusable economic data — the kind that reduces search costs for employers, lowers the barrier to entry for people without traditional credentials, and lets every new issuer plug into a market that already has liquidity, instead of building one from zero.
What this actually unlocks
Once competencies are visible, standardized, and portable, a lot of things become possible that weren’t before:
- HR processes can move from filtering by degree or job title toward skills-based hiring and development. The corporate strategy can be directly linked to employees’ learning pathways.
- Job orientation becomes concrete: young people and career-changers can see, in ESCO terms, how their existing competencies map onto real occupations and pathways.
- Individualized learning paths become possible, because a system that can see someone’s real competency profile can recommend what to learn next — instead of assuming everyone starts from zero.
- Socioeconomic background stops being destiny. A competency profile built from badges collected across a makerspace, a volunteer project, and an online course carries the same weight as one built from a traditional degree — because it’s expressed in the same standardized, verifiable language.
The puzzle piece
We don’t think OEB is the only missing piece in the puzzle. A lot of things are changing right now. Universities are restructuring their business models, HR departments are moving further toward AI-supported systems, and the EUDI Wallet is setting new standards for how easily learners can manage and share their credentials. We think OEB can be the connecting tissue that lets all of them work together, that turns “I did this course” into “here is a verifiable, portable, standards-based statement of what I can do, it’s mine, and it unlocks doors to next steps.”
Badges are the visible token of it. The interesting part is everything underneath.
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