2023 was a record year for digital credentials, and our customers were a big reason why. Across various industries, our customers are at the forefront of making education more accessible, accomplishments easier to share and verify, and career pathways more clearly defined. We’ve been blown away by the efforts made by those using Accredible’s platform to fill the skills gap by offering industry-relevant digital credentials that address the evolving job market demands.
So, let’s celebrate! Our customers published a record number of credentials to millions of learners, showing them how to grow their careers by accessing new courses and skill-based credentials. Those learners showed off their successes to their networks and brought increased awareness to issuers’ programs—more than we have ever seen. People are hungry to learn and advance, and our customers are making it easier than ever to do just that. Now, that deserves a shout.
Let’s dive into what we accomplished together in 2023*.
We’re starting strong! Accredible customers published nearly 25 million unique credentials in 2023 alone—a 26.3% increase over 2022. That brings our total platform issuance to well over 80 million credentials since Accredible’s inception 10 years ago. We’re blown away by all of the courses and credentials, from technical training to online education, our customers have offered their learners this year!
Wow! This year, nearly 6 million people across the globe earned a digital credential through Accredible. That’s equivalent to the population of Singapore!
With a 41.2% surge in recipients compared to 2022, this further proves the demand for skills-based education is increasing, and learners are eager to showcase their skills and achievements to their networks.
In 2023, our customers offered 80,000 new courses to their learners, up 19.2% year-over-year. That’s an average of 35 new courses launched per customer this year!
Our customers took the Accredible platform this year and truly made it their own, offering career and technical credentials that help learners acquire new skills, update their existing skills, signal the competencies they already have, and in return, drive more program awareness and revenue for the organizations themselves!
Learners were excited to spread the word about the credentials they earned this year! We saw a 19.1% increase in engaged credentials in 2023, meaning that once credentials hit learners’ inboxes, they accessed and downloaded them, added them to their resumes, and shared them across their social media channels. We know FOMO is real, so the more people display their accomplishments, the more likely it is to inspire someone else to earn a credential.
With Accredible, learners can verify and showcase their skills and achievements without creating an account or logging in, meaning people are more inclined to engage with their earned credentials. Issuers can analyze which courses and credentials their learners are most excited about by tracking that engagement. It’s a win-win!
Our issued credentials helped drive 534,000 referral traffic users back to our customers in 2023—an 84.9% increase from 2022! Thanks to our platform, our customers can track all of these users (potential learners) who saw issued credentials shared by their peers and clicked through to learn more about their programs.
Think about that for a moment. Because of the ease of credential acceptance and sharing, our customers are developing credential flywheels of organic marketing and growth for their programs simply because their students are enjoying their courses and sharing their credentials! We can’t wait to see this number continue to climb next year.
So, who issued the most career-advancing credentials this year? Drum roll, please! The top ten issuers of 2023 are:
- Skillsoft
- CFI (Corporate Finance Institute)
- McGraw-Hill
- Skillsbox ICDL
- Google Cloud Certified
- The Funded Trader
- Trinity College London
- Snowflake
- British Council
Together, these ten organizations educated millions of learners across the globe. That’s seriously impressive. And, although these businesses and institutions use Accredible in different ways, they have a shared goal of putting the power of learning back into their learners’ hands and turning them into experts through digital credentialing. Bravo!
Building on our 2023 top issuers, we’re excited to induct our inaugural class to the Million Credential Club: Skillsoft, CFI, Google, and McGraw Hill!! This exclusive group has issued more than 1 million credentials to date, and we couldn’t be more proud of them and their learners. Let’s learn a bit more about each of these incredible organizations.
- Skillsoft offers a range of digital learning solutions designed to help organizations and individuals acquire and develop skills. With Skillsoft, organizations worldwide have empowered talent to futureproof skillsets and earn millions of badges in leadership, compliance, AI, and more.
- CFI offers more than 200 courses dedicated to business and finance. More than 1.8 million professionals across thousands of firms have relied on CFI to achieve their goals.
- Google offers Skillshop, an education program that offers courses on Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, and more. You can see the more than 23,000 individuals who have completed the training in their learner directory (via Accredible’s Spotlight Directory).
- McGraw Hill offers SIMnet, an online training and assessment solution for learning Microsoft Office within the computing curriculum. They built several learning pathways via Accredible’s Pathways that allow learners to achieve White, Yellow, Purple, and Black belt credentials for Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Word.
To help our customers achieve these milestones and provide their learners with a great experience, our team at Accredible was busy building new innovations and optimizing current solutions in 2023.
We most recently launched Pathways, a feature that enables issuers to deliver a clearer, more effective roadmap for learners to achieve career growth and advancement opportunities. Using Pathways, course providers have increased new course enrollment by up to 367%.
We released Earning Criteria, an engaging and efficient way to add, update, and remove criteria to your credentials. We also expanded upon Collections, which helps customers streamline, measure, and grow their course catalogs.
Finally, we launched our integration with Skilljar, enabling issuing organizations to seamlessly connect their Skilljar training content to deliver rewarding, verifiable, and market-valuable credentials to learners.
That’s a wrap on 2023. Thank you to our customers, partners, and team for making it an incredible year. We couldn’t be happier for our customers who continue to lead the way in offering best-in-class credentialing programs and for their learners who are putting in the work and showcasing their skills and achievements through digital credentials. We know you’re just getting started.
As we look ahead to 2024, we believe digital credentials will continue to become the new currency in today’s skill-based learning and hiring labor market. More organizations will move from simply issuing only paper or PDF credentials that limit learner sharing and program growth to meeting market and learner demands for digital, shareable, transferable, and verifiable proof of skills and competencies. And in the process, they’ll create their flywheel of program referrals and growth and returning learners.
*Accredible digital credential platform data from January 1, 2023, to November 21, 2023.
