Creating a Badge
A badge (a.k.a. an Achievement in Open Badges 3.0 terms) is a reusable template that defines what you award. Once created, you can issue many credentials from the same badge.
Prerequisites
- You're a member of an approved organization with at least the Issuer role.
- Your plan allows another badge template (Free: 100 max; Professional & Enterprise: unlimited).
Create a badge
- Go to your organization → Badge templates → New badge (
/organizations/{orgId}/badges/new). - Fill in the form:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Image | Required. PNG, JPEG, WebP, or SVG. Max 5 MB. Square images work best (recommended 512×512). |
| Name | The credential title. Appears in emails, on the verification page, and on LinkedIn. |
| Slug | Auto-generated from the name. Forms part of the public badge URL /o/{org-slug}/badges/{badge-slug}. |
| Description | What this badge represents. Markdown is not rendered — keep to plain text. |
| Criteria | What a recipient did to earn it. Shown on the public verification page. |
| External URL (optional) | A link to your own page about this badge. |
| Expires in days (optional) | If set, every credential issued from this badge will expire that many days after issuance (e.g. 730 for a two-year cert). Leave blank for non-expiring credentials. |
| Skills | Tags representing the skills the badge covers (e.g. kubernetes, cloud-native). Shown on the verification page and the public profile. |
- Click Create badge.
Where badges show up publicly
Once created and your organization is approved, the badge has these public URLs:
| URL | Purpose |
|---|---|
/o/{org-slug}/badges/{badge-slug} |
Marketing-style badge page with description, criteria, skills, and stats. |
/achievements/{org-slug}/{badge-slug} |
Open Badges 3.0 JSON-LD definition (machine-readable). |
The badge image is uploaded to Google Cloud Storage and served from a stable URL.
Editing & deactivating
- Edit (
/organizations/{orgId}/badges/{badgeId}/edit) — Owner or Admin only. You can change name, description, criteria, image, skills, andexpiresInDays. Existing credentials issued from this badge are not re-signed; their content stays as it was at issue time. - Delete — If no credentials have been issued from the badge yet, deletion is permanent. If credentials exist, the badge is deactivated instead, hiding it from the gallery and preventing new issuances while leaving existing credentials intact and verifiable.
Plan limits
| Tier | Max badge templates per organization |
|---|---|
| Free | 100 |
| Professional | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Unlimited |
If you hit the limit, you'll see an error when creating a new badge with a link to upgrade.
Tips
- Use a recognizable image — the badge image is what recipients share to LinkedIn and Twitter. Make it on-brand.
- Set
expiresInDaysthoughtfully — recipients can renew expired credentials, but a credential that never expires can also never need renewal. Pick what fits your program. - Add specific skills — recruiters and ATS systems pick up the skills tags from the OB3 JSON. Be precise.