Building Skills, Trust, and Impact with Digital Badges in Belfast
An interview with Jamie Yohanis, Employability & Skills Officer at Belfast City Council
Over the past few years, Belfast City Council’s Employability and Skills team has been pioneering a powerful new approach to helping residents access meaningful work — by combining targeted employment academies with digital badges issued through the Navigatr platform.
To explore how this work is evolving, we sat down with Jamie Yohanis, who is helping to drive this transformation from the inside. Jamie works across the city’s employment and training ecosystem, supporting both internal and external organisations in their adoption of digital badges.
In this wide-ranging conversation, he shares the lessons learned, surprising outcomes, and bold ambitions behind the city’s growing badge community.
Can you tell us about your role in the Economic Development Unit?
I’m an Employability and Skills Officer at Belfast City Council. I’m part of the Employability and Skills team within the Economic Development Unit. One of my main responsibilities is supporting our digital badge community, both within the council and among our external partners. That includes training providers, delivery agents, and local employers who are using digital badges to capture the skills people gain through employment academies and other training.
What does the team look like and how are digital badges being used across your work?
Our team has 17 people, and most of us work with digital badges in some capacity. Each academy, for example, our Transport Academy, has a dedicated officer who works with the relevant delivery agents to embed badges into the learning experience. But it goes beyond just employment academies. Our enterprise and business growth teams also run training and development for small businesses and entrepreneurs across Belfast, and many of those interventions are now being digitally badged too.
What would you say have been the biggest successes so far?
There are many, but the standout success for me is how digital badges have allowed us to codify skills and experiences that are otherwise difficult to articulate. It’s especially important because many of the most sought-after skills — soft skills, behaviours, and sector-specific competencies exist alongside or outside formal qualifications. Badging gives participants a language to talk about what they can do.
“People gain so many valuable skills throughout their academy experience that don’t show up on a formal qualification. Badges let us describe what they’ve done — and employers can understand and value that”
Has the Navigatr platform changed how you manage or report your work?
Absolutely. There are a few major shifts.
Firstly, we’re now able to evidence our outcomes much more easily. Whether it’s the number of participants completing a programme, securing a job, or progressing into further training, Navigatr gives us clear, accessible data for funders and stakeholders.
Second, we’ve started using the platform to embed surveys directly into badge journeys. This was a game-changer for us in collecting important equality and participant data — things we’ve previously struggled to gather consistently.
Everything now lives in one place — no paper, no multiple systems — and that makes life easier across the board.
“Now, people engage with our surveys as part of earning their badges, and our return rates have gone up significantly. It’s streamlined the process for us, for providers, and for participants”
What’s your long-term vision for this work?
Right now, our focus is on closing the loop with employers.
We’ve done a great job engaging training providers and supporting learners. But now we’re investing in helping employers not just recognise digital badges, but actually integrate them into recruitment processes. That’s how we unlock their full value.
We see so much potential in helping employers manage both their own staff training and how they assess external candidates — all through badges and the Navigator platform. That’s the next big step.
You’ve recently been using the new AI Badge Assistant. How has that changed things?
It’s honestly a game-changer.
Before, writing a badge was a manual, time-consuming process — defining skills, drafting summaries, writing criteria, creating visuals. If you weren’t tech-savvy or didn’t have design skills, it could take hours. And since badging is often just one part of someone’s job, the result was: some badges simply didn’t get written.
We review and tweak it for accuracy and tone, especially for bespoke programmes, but the lift is so much lighter. The quality has gone up, and the process is no longer a burden. For people who don’t like writing badges — and that’s most of us — it’s been a massive improvement.
“Now, we just input the curriculum or learning outcomes into the AI Assistant, and it does 98% of the work — including visuals, summaries, and skills tags.”
If someone was starting a digital badge project today, what’s one piece of advice you’d offer?
Partnerships, badges are only valuable if the people involved understand and use them; learners, trainers, and especially employers. You can issue all the badges you want, but if employers don’t understand what they’re seeing, or participants don’t know what to do with them, then they’re just digital stickers.
Invest in building capacity and understanding across your ecosystem. Work directly with training providers, support learners in recognising the value of their achievements, and focus on getting employers to engage with badging. It takes time and relationship-building, but it’s the only way to make it sustainable.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Just that this isn’t about tech for tech’s sake. It’s about helping people move forward in life — into work, into growth, into confidence. And if tools like Navigatr and digital badges help us do that more effectively, then it’s worth every bit of effort.
