Guiding Questions:

• Are there specific soft skills that can be tied to employment outcomes?
• Would it be possible to create digital or open badges for soft skills?
• Is digital badging a successful strategy for workforce preparation that would meet the needs of students, educators, WIOA program vendors and employers alike?

Agenda & Presentations

9:30 – 10:00 a.m.	Registration and Continental Breakfast
10:00 – 10:10	Welcome Prabal Chakrabarti Senior Vice President and Community Affairs Officer Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
10:10 – 10:20	Event Overview Chris Shannon Community Affairs Manager Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Part 1: Awareness Building
10:20. – 10:50	Research on the "Soft Skills" that Open Doors Laura Lippman Senior Research Scientist ChildTrends
10:50 – 11:20	Business Panel Response to Research Moderator: Jeff Fuhrer Executive Vice President Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Joanne Pokaski Director of Workforce Development Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Krista Blair Assistant Vice President, Human Resources Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Amanda Maher Specialist Senior Economic Development City of Somerville Christine McCarthy Executive Director of Human Resources Legal Sea Foods
11:20– 11:50	Digital and Open Badges: The Future of Credentialing? Presentation | Companion Resources Jonathan Finkelstein Founder and CEO Credly
11:50 – 12:10 p.m.	Group Work: Personal Badging Exercise
12:10 – 12:45	Luncheon & Informal Teambuilding Activity Moderator: Chris Shannon Community Affairs Manager Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Part 2: Interactive Sessions
12:45 – 2:00	Digital Badging Prototype Development
2:00 – 3:20	Case Study Scenarios Delcie Bean Founder & Board President Tech Foundry, Inc Hillary Salmons Executive Director Providence After School Alliance (PASA) Chris Smith Executive Director Boston After School & Beyond
2:00 – 2:35	Case Study 1: Open Challenge
2:35 – 2:45	Coffee Break
2:45 – 3:20	Case Study 2: Open Challenge—STEM Badges (PASA, Boston & Beyond)
3:20 – 3:30	Closing Remarks Jeff Fuhrer Executive Vice President Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
3:30	Adjourn

Event Materials

Badging Prototype Activity Posters
Table 1 | Table 2 | Table 3 | Table 4 | Table 5 | Table 6 | Table 7 | Table 8 | Table 9

Convening Notes

Related Presentations

Research on the "Soft Skills" that Open Doors
Presented at SETS Roundtable Event - 3/30/2015
This is an updated version of Laura Lippman's presentation, which adds 3 key skills and 2 additional supportive ones that are optimal for youth development programming.

Workforce Development Skills Alignment

Closing the Massachusetts Skills Gap: Recommendations and Action Steps
(Commonwealth Corporation)

Innovations and Future Directions for Workforce Development in the Post-Recession Era (Urban Institute)

Middle Skills Jobs and the Growing Importance of Postsecondary Education (Achieve)

National Career Readiness Certificate (ACT)

Digital Badging

7 Things You Should Know About… Badges (Educause)

7 Things You Should Know About… Badging for Professional Development (Educause)

The Potential and Value of Using Digital Badges for Adult Learners (American Institute for Research, co-written by Jonathan Finkelstein)

Brandman University Teams Up with Credly to Issue Digital Badges as Part of Competency-Based Education Degrees (Credly)

Constellations tutorial (Badge OS)

Expanding Education and Workforce Opportunities Through Digital Badges (Alliance for Excellent Education)

Digital Badging Projects in Action

Badges for Vets

NYC DOE's DIG/IT program

Providence After School Alliance

Purdue University

Smithsonian

Oregon State University

Peer 2 Peer University

Other digital badging projects

Delcie Bean
Founder and CEO
Paragus Strategic I.T.

Delcie Bean is a born entrepreneur. Having started his first company at the age of 8 and a non-profit at the age of 13, he thrives on coming up with ideas, building businesses and having a lot of fun in the process. Delcie's mission is to use business and technological innovation as a positive force to impact the lives of clients, employees, colleagues and the community as a whole.

Delcie has come a long way since founding Vertical Horizons as a sophomore at Amherst Regional High School. That company has evolved into Paragus Strategic IT which currently employs close to 40 people, with new staff being added every 6-8 weeks. Inc. Magazine has acknowledged Paragus as one of the 5,000 fastest growing privately held companies in America 4 years in a row. In 2013, CRN Global ranked Paragus the 30th fastest-growing IT company in the United States and the Greater Chamber of Commerce of Springfield named Paragus that 2nd fastest growing company in Hampshire and Hampden county.       

Paragus provides outsourced IT solutions for businesses and organizations. It is a fun and growing company whose employees are committed to delivering exceptional customer experience. In 2014 they were awarded the coveted Employer's Choice Award by the Employers Association of the Northeast and The Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce.

In addition to Paragus, Delcie is founder and CEO of Waterdog Technologies, a technology distribution company with an innovative and disruptive business model. Waterdog is located in Springfield, MA and is backed by several local investors who anticipate it reaching the 100 million dollar mark within the next 8 years.

Delcie also channeled his passion and creativity into Tech Foundry, a nonprofit he started in May of 2013. By building a dynamic technology institute that provides the training and skills needed to get high-paid tech jobs in the Valley, Tech Foundry aims to turn Western Massachusetts into the next booming tech city. From creating jobs to attracting big business to the area, Tech Foundry is poised to have a massive, long-term impact on the future of the region.

Most recently Delcie has been working with Valley Venture Mentors and Develop Springfield to launch the Springfield Innovation Center that will include his Innovation Café concept— providing a totally new and different downtown watering hole where people can share ideas, energy, and great coffee.

Currently 28 years old, Delcie lives in his home state of New Hampshire with his wife and two young boys.

Krista Blair
Assistant Vice President
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Krista Blair is an Assistant Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, with current responsibility for the Human Resources Department.  Krista has been with the Federal Reserve for over 35 years, with experience in a number of areas of the Bank – including Research, Statistics, Quality, Marketing, and Strategic Planning.  She holds a BA in economics from Wellesley College.

Among her other HR duties, Krista has responsibility for internships, co-ops and other talent management programs.  Each year the Federal Reserve receives thousands of applications for a relatively small number of summer internships.

Krista is also the point person on the Federal Reserve's efforts to encourage college internships as a "win-win" for students, employers, and the region's economy – and a talent retention tactic for New England.  Krista particularly enjoys this work because of its connection to the Federal Reserve's mandate to promote full employment, and the ways it can contribute to the New England economy and the real people that make it up.  Krista also likes the fact that the initiative affords her the opportunity to meet many people in the Boston business, higher ed., and policymaking communities.

Krista attributes her long tenure at the Federal Reserve to the public-service focus of the organization and the type of dedicated, public-spirited people that mission attracts.

Krista considers working with people from all levels and all areas of the Bank the most gratifying part of leadership in a human resources function – and believes that internships are one of the most promising ways for employers in New England to develop a steady and loyal pipeline of talent for the future.

Prabal Chakrabarti
Senior Vice President and Community Affairs Officer
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Prabal Chakrabarti is Senior Vice President and Community Affairs Officer. He has published and presented research on community development topics such as affordable housing, venture capital in secondary cities, and urban business development. He plays a key leadership role in a prize competition to revitalize smaller cities called the Working Cities Challenge. He has edited volumes on the future of the Community Reinvestment Act and on addressing challenges from foreclosed properties.

Previously, Prabal was at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, where he led a research effort under Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter to measure economic competitiveness in America's inner cities. Prabal previously served in the U.S. Treasury in economic policy and he co-wrote the UNDP report Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor.

Prabal holds graduate degrees from MIT and Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.S. from the University of Illinois, where he was a Truman Scholar. He serves on the Marshall Scholarship Selection Committee and on the board of directors of the Children's Investment Fund.

Jonathan Finkelstein
Founder and CEO
Credly

Jonathan Finkelstein is founder and CEO of Credly, creator of the Open Credit digital credential framework, and director of the open source BadgeOS project. Together these platforms have enabled thousands of organizations to recognize and reward skills and achievement. 
As founder of LearningTimes, Jonathan's work has helped hundreds of mission-driven organizations produce and launch innovative online programs, products and platforms that have impacted the lives of millions of learners. 

Jonathan is author of Learning in Real Time (Wiley), contributing author to The Digital Museum (AAM), and co-author of a report for the US Department of Education on the potential for digital badges. Jonathan is a frequent speaker on digital credentials, open badges and the future of learning and workforce development. The son of two New York City public school teachers, Jonathan graduated with honors from Harvard University.

Jeff Fuhrer
Executive Vice President
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Jeff Fuhrer is Executive Vice President and Senior Policy Advisor and responsible for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's regional and community outreach functions. He is also an associate economist of the Federal Open Market Committee. In June 1992, he joined the Bank's research department as an assistant vice president and economist, and for 1995–2001 headed its Open Economy Macro/International section. In 2000, Jeff was named senior vice president and monetary policy advisor. In 2001, he became director of research, and in 2006, he was named executive vice president.

Jeff began his career at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, first as a research assistant, and then, after earning his doctorate in 1985, as a senior economist. He has been active in economic research for more than two decades and has served as an associate editor of the American Economic Review. Jeff has published numerous scholarly papers on the interactions among monetary policy, inflation, consumer spending, and asset prices. He has been married for more than 30 years and has three grown children. Jeff earned a bachelor's in economics with highest honors from Princeton University and received his master's and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Laura Lippman
Senior Research Scientist
ChildTrends

Laura Lippman is a Senior Research Scientist at Child Trends, a private non-profit that conducts research to improve children's lives. She has over 35 years' experience developing measures and indicators of child and family well-being, education, workforce readiness, and positive youth development. She has authored numerous seminal publications on child and family indicators, positive indicators, international comparisons of family and child well-being, and education, including co-authoring two books on defining and measuring flourishing among adolescents: Flourishing Children: Defining and Testing Indicators of Positive Development, and What do Children Need to Flourish? Conceptualizing and Measuring Indicators of Positive Development.

Currently, she is the PI of the Workforce Connections project, recommending key soft skills needed for workforce readiness globally, to inform program investments. She is also a lead researcher on in the Fairfax County School Start Time Evaluation, the U.S. Department of Education's Safe and Supportive Schools Technical Assistance Center, and Measuring Social and Emotional Development in Early Childhood for the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. She is also co- PI of the World Family Map http://worldfamilymap.org/2014/.

She has contributed to many federal surveys, including the National Household Education Survey and the National Survey of Children's Health.  Previous work has included major reviews and recommendations of indicators and measures of SEL for the Raikes and Tauck Foundations, on college and workforce readiness competencies for the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation, on positive indicators for the John Templeton Foundation, and on indicators of postsecondary success for the Lumina Foundation. She has developed and published conceptual frameworks for positive indicators and promotive factors for UNICEF, and published reviews of the research on positive indicators in the Handbook of Child Well-being and the Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Studies, as well as other peer reviewed journals. Previously, she served as Senior Analyst/Demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S Department of Education, and led staff across 18 federal agencies in developing the first official U.S. monitoring report on child well-being, America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-being.  Her graduate studies were in demography at Georgetown University, and she has a B.A. in Anthropology from the Colorado College.

Amanda Maher
Senior Economic Development Specialist
City of Somerville

Amanda Maher is Senior Economic Development Specialist with the City of Somerville, where she manages many of the City's efforts around large-scale commercial redevelopment, business attraction and expansion, local hiring and workforce development. Maher is particularly focused on understanding employer hiring needs and then identifying training opportunities to connect lower-income residents with Somerville-based jobs. Prior to joining the City of Somerville, Maher worked for the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, where she managed the Inner City Economic Forum, a year-round dissemination and engagement platform around solutions for urban economic and business development. Maher received her M.S. in Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University's Dukakis Center.

Joanne Pokaski
Director of Workforce Development
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Joanne Pokaski is the Director of Workforce Development at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Under Joanne's leadership, BIDMC has launched programs that sponsor employees' training and promotion to nine hard-to-fill occupations, including medical coders and patient care technicians.  BIDMC also provides career and academic counseling and free on-site pre-college courses and college-level science courses for all employees.

Prior to BIDMC, Joanne served as director of Boston Career Link, a one-stop career center in Boston. Before that, she worked at Goodwill Boston, the Clinton White House and as Special Assistant to the Administrator of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.  Joanne earned a Bachelor's degree in Government from Harvard College and a Master's degree in Public Affairs from Princeton University. Joanne is a member of Boston's and Massachusetts' workforce investment boards. She chairs the Boston Healthcare Careers Consortium, which convenes Boston's employers, academic institutions and workforce system to improve training pathways that lead to healthcare jobs.  Joanne serves on the executive committee of CareerSTAT, an initiative encouraging more US healthcare employers to invest in frontline workers. She is an advisor to the Clinton Global Initiative America's workforce development committee.

Hillary Salmons
Executive Director
Providence After School Alliance (PASA)

As Executive Director, Hillary manages the oversight of the Providence After School Alliance (PASA) and its three strategies. She also has primary responsibility for community engagement and fundraising efforts. Previously, Hillary led an education initiative called Rhode Island Scholars where business leaders spoke to middle school students around the state on the importance of college and taking math and science courses in high school. She also served as the Vice President for Program Development for Health & Education Leadership for Providence (HELP), a now-defunct coalition focused on improving the health and education of the children of Providence. While there, she worked to establish numerous systemic health and education initiatives. Hillary has a MA in Public Administration from the University of Oklahoma and a BA from Harvard University.

Chris Smith
Executive Director
Boston After School & Beyond

Chris was appointed Executive Director of Boston After School & Beyond in the fall of 2008. He has over a decade of experience leading policy, measurement, and programmatic initiatives. Before joining Boston Beyond, Chris worked at the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC) for ten years, first as Director of Employer Partnerships then as Chief of Staff. While at the PIC, he worked with local business leaders to create Classroom at the Workplace, a learning model that combines intensive academic acceleration and paid employment for teenagers who have failed the high-stakes MCAS exams. Since its inception, the program has helped well over 1,000 students earn a high school diploma. Chris also played a lead role in coordinating Boston's first-ever study of college graduation rates of Boston Public Schools students and in developing legislation to decrease the dropout rate in Massachusetts. Before joining the PIC, Chris worked at the US Department of Education in Washington, DC, on the Secretary of Education's family and community involvement in education initiative. A native of Worcester, MA, Chris earned an MBA at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, and a BA in American Studies from Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

Richard Walker
Senior Vice President and Advisor to the (Fed) President
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Richard Walker has over three decades of experience in business and community development in Boston. For the last 24 years, he has worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he is currently Senior Vice President and Advisor to the (Fed) President. Previously, he served in executive positions at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, the Lincoln Filene Center for Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University, and the Greater Roxbury Development Corporation. He has been instrumental in developing the Boston Business Collaborative, a project that links major corporations with existing minority businesses and led to the formation of the Initiative for a New Economy. Richard was an initial participant in the formulation of the Black/Jewish roundtable with American Jewish Committee. He also participated in the working groups that helped form the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation and Massachusetts Community and Banking Council. In September 2000, the governor of Massachusetts appointed Richard to the board of directors of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and in 2007 he was appointed to the board of trustees of Bunker Hill Community College. Richard serves on numerous other boards and is actively involved in promoting fair and equal access to finance and credit through a variety of approaches. He is the executive producer of the award-winning video To Their Credit:Financing Women Owned Business, which was first broadcast on KQED in San Francisco in July 1999. He was also responsible for the video Lesson from a Storm: Banking for Safety. Richard was instrumental in the development of the Federal Reserve Bank's widely distributed publication Closing the Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending, designed to help banks avoid possible discriminatory lending practices. And he produced the popular consumer video Identity Theft: Protect Yourself and its companion publication, Identity Theft. Currently, Richard is playing a key leadership role in an innovative project for the Bank called the Working Cities Challenge. The Challenge is a pilot grant competition funded by Living Cities, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership and is designed to encourage collaborative leadership and systems change in the Gateway Cities. Richard resides in Waltham and has a summer home on Martha's Vineyard.