Improving personal profiles with Decentralized Accreditation

When filling in your online profile on LinkedIn, it is easy to exaggerate your skills and experiences. This could result in awkward situations when starting your new job, for both you and your employer. With the Blockchain based Decentral Accreditation plugin this will be history.

Originally posted on October 13, 2016
By Paul Schoenmakers

In the present day society online profiles are a great tool for selling yourself to give a boost to your career. Pages like LinkedIn are widely used for the acquisition of new employers by organisations. As you probably know, on LinkedIn you are able to fill in your skills (from programming languages to social skills) and other LinkedIn users could confirm this. In essence this is already some kind of decentralized system. However, nowadays it is common for people to follow online courses and these courses could be directly related to the skill-set a person has. The development of a student in online courses (or of course in universities) can be viewed and verified automatically.

In co-operation with Dutch universities OneUp company designed a decentralized accreditation extension for google Chrome. This extension is an overlay (or injection) for LinkedIn profiles as a verification for the skills. In figure 1 this extra feature on a test LinkedIn profile can be seen.

As can be seen in the above figure, there are boxes with checkmarks added to the skills-part of the profile. When a skill is verified by for example a university or another institution, the box next to that particular skill is checked. When clicking on a box with a checkmark, you are directed to a page with an overview of the experiences undertaken to learn that skill. In figure 2 the courses that were completed to learn Python are shown.

In this case Joris attended two courses in Python: ‘Programming in Python‘ and ‘Advanced programming in Python‘. Both Coursera and TU Delft have verified the completion of the courses and therefore he earned a checkmark on his LinkedIn page at this skill. Optional is the possibility to add a certificate of the organisation for completing a course. In figure 1 there are also skills that are not verified (yet). Institutions like Coursera or universities are able to verify courses or skills manually, as can be seen in figure 3. Also the extension could be directly connected to Osiris, the grading portal. In this way the courses are automatically verified.

In this case, Coursera has accredited different courses for different people. When a institution does this, it is automatically updated on the personal page of this person. In figure 4 such a personal skill-page can be seen, with an overview of all his skills, both accredited and not accredited.

In the above figure the personal page of Joris Bontje is given. The information of this page is combined with (or injected in) the LinkedIn page.

At the moment this extension is still just a prototype with a few hardcoded skills and experiences and not yet available for the public. The first demos peaked the interest of some institutions and there are many possibilities to expand. The Chrome extension was originally designed as a tool for universities but as you can see, it is very helpful for employers seeking new people. The plugin for Chrome was tested with LinkedIn pages but it can also be integrated with Blackboard, the tool for students to access resources online. Then it would be easier for students to participate to courses at different universities.

Another option is for the students to add their interests (in skills) on their LinkedIn page. Universities could use this knowledge to possibly adjust their program and offer or suggest different courses. Also, when you add an interest to learn a certain skill, people can stimulate you by donating (small) amounts of cryptocurrencies like ETH.

It is clear that the extension is still in the early phase but in potential this could really improve personal profiles and possibly stimulate personal growth. If you have questions or comments on this extension it is possible to contact us via the following link.

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