A note before we start: June didn’t get its own edition. Three webinars ran, a new article went out, and an idea that had been circling this newsletter for months finally had a name. It just didn’t make it into an edition at the time — so this one catches up properly rather than force something thin out in June.
Good training, ready to shine
Let’s say you went on a training 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’re fine. If all you’ve got to go on is seventy slides across three sessions, you learnt so many things, all of them pretty good, but how do you sum them up? What do you put on your CV? How do you summarise it to the HR manager?
That’s what we’re actually in the business of. And it’s the same gap this newsletter keeps circling back to, just from a different angle each time.
Now flip it round. You’re 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 stuff.
Ask your learner three months later what they can actually do because of it, and what do they say? “It was really useful.” Great — useful how? That’s the bit worth chasing. Not more training. Just making sure the good work you’ve 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 percent a year through to 2033.
Buried further down in that report: Open CPD is named as one of the top ten players in this space. I’m not going to pretend that wasn’t a good moment to read.
But the growth number is the more interesting bit. Fifteen to twenty percent a year means a lot of training providers are suddenly building badges, digital certificates, whatever you want to call them, into what they offer.
And that has to be good news. Think about how many people are now walking away with meaningful, better-defined evidence of what they learned, instead of just a certificate with their name and a date on it.
But it’s only scratching the surface. We’re here to make sure everybody who needs it gets a certificate that actually reflects their learning. Not just to issue more badges. To propel 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 — no follow-up questions allowed — tell you the one thing your training was actually about, from what you’ve given them to look at?
Not “is this good training.” Not “did people enjoy it.” Just: can a stranger tell you the one thing it was actually about?
That’s the same question running underneath everything above. Read the full piece here.
Passing it does not mean extra work, trust me it’s already there
If you look at it carefully, it’s already there: it’s structure — a plain statement of what the training aimed to do, the skills it built, and what a learner could do afterwards that they couldn’t before.
That structure isn’t a smaller version of the training. It’s a translation of it — the depth stays exactly where it was, just newly visible.
Here’s 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’s easy: not redesigning your training, not extra work. The skills and outcomes were already there in your course materials — this just gives them somewhere clear, permanent, and verifiable to live.
What June actually looked like
What actually surprised me this June wasn’t anything 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 simply weren’t liveable. Training providers, on the whole, didn’t 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 a course.
That might be the purest version of the one thing test there is. RPL starts from exactly that question — strip away the certificates and the course titles, what can this person actually demonstrate they know how to do?
It’s a good reminder that recognition was never only about what happens inside a training room. Sometimes the harder, more valuable part is working out what someone already knows.
You can find ChangeFactor at changefactor.co.uk
Coming up
Every Wednesday @ 9:30am BST — Live Q&A Drop-In
Open discussion. No slides, no pitch. Bring your questions.
meet.google.com/wqk-ssje-hdw
The Recognition Gap is a monthly newsletter about professional recognition, credibility, and the infrastructure that makes learning visible.
Published by Marta Kalas, Open CPD.
