The Recognition Gap, July 2026

The Recognition Gap is a monthly newsletter about professional recognition, credibility, and the infrastructure that makes learning visible. This is the July 2026 edition, republished here as an archive copy.

A note before we start: June did not get its own edition. Three webinars ran, a new article went out, and an idea that had been circling this newsletter for months finally got a name. It just did not make it into an edition at the time, so this one catches up properly rather than forcing something thin out in June.

Good training, ready to shine

Say you went on a training course last week. Now sum up what you learned in three sentences.

How hard is that?

If your certificate spells out the learning outcomes and the skills involved, you are fine. If all you have to go on is seventy slides across three sessions, you learned a great many things, all of them pretty good, but how do you sum them up? What do you put on your CV? How do you describe it to an HR manager?

That is what we are actually in the business of, and it is the same gap this newsletter keeps circling back to, from a different angle each time.

Now flip it round. You are the one who ran the training. You spent weeks on it. Proper structure, real examples, maybe a few late nights getting the case studies right. Genuinely good work.

Ask your learner three months later what they can actually do because of it, and what do they say? "It was really useful." Useful how? That is the bit worth chasing. Not more training. Just making sure the good work you have already done gets to shine.

The market caught up

While I was writing this, a market report landed in my feed. Predictable headline: digital badges in education now worth billions, growing 15 to 20 per cent a year through to 2033.

Buried further down in that report, Open CPD is named as one of the top ten players in the space. I am not going to pretend that was not a good moment to read.

The growth number is the more interesting part though. Fifteen to twenty per cent a year means a great many training providers are building badges, digital certificates, whatever you want to call them, into what they offer.

That has to be good news. Think how many people are now walking away with meaningful, better-defined evidence of what they learned, instead of a certificate carrying a name and a date.

It is still only scratching the surface. We are here to make sure everybody who needs it gets a certificate that reflects their learning. Not just to issue more badges. To move careers forward.

The one thing test

I wrote this up properly a few weeks ago for CPD Perspectives, under that name: the one thing test. Could someone with no context, and no follow-up questions allowed, tell you the one thing your training was actually about, from what you have given them to look at?

Not whether it is good training. Not whether people enjoyed it. Just: can a stranger tell you the one thing it was about?

That is the same question running underneath everything above.

Passing it is not extra work, because it is already there

Look carefully and it is already there. It is structure: a plain statement of what the training aimed to do, the skills it built, and what a learner can do afterwards that they could not before.

That structure is not a smaller version of the training. It is a translation of it. The depth stays exactly where it was, and becomes newly visible.

Here is a real one: Understanding Orthopaedic Procedures (Basic), issued by Sinem Afrique Medical. Key skills. Learning outcomes. Course date, hours, delivery type. All of it real, none of it invented for the page.

So it is easier than it sounds. Not redesigning your training, not extra work. The skills and outcomes were already in your course materials. This just gives them somewhere clear, permanent and verifiable to live.

What June actually looked like

What surprised me in June had nothing to do with certificates. It was the heat.

Schools across the UK and Europe were shuffling exam schedules and cutting teaching days short because classrooms were not liveable. Training providers, on the whole, did not have that problem. So much of what we do now runs online that a heatwave barely touches the schedule.

Not a lesson, just an observation: the same flexibility that makes training easier to document also seems to be what keeps it running when everything else grinds to a halt.

Member spotlight: ChangeFactor

This month I want to highlight ChangeFactor, Vivienne Williams' consultancy.

Vivienne trains on safeguarding, but the part I want to spotlight is something else she does alongside it: Recognition of Prior Learning, formally recognising skills someone already has, built through experience rather than through a course.

That might be the purest version of the one thing test there is. Recognition of Prior Learning starts from exactly that question. Strip away the certificates and the course titles, and what can this person actually demonstrate they know how to do?

It is a good reminder that recognition was never only about what happens inside a training room. Sometimes the harder and more valuable part is working out what someone already knows.

Coming up

The live Q&A drop-in runs every Wednesday morning. Open discussion, no slides, no pitch, bring your questions. Details and joining link are on the Q&A page.

Published by Marta Kalas, Open CPD.