# What is a badge?

Badges are a means of recognising certain skills and achievements acquired through online courses. Badges demonstrate your work and achievement on a course.

While these badges do not carry any formal credit and are not subject to the same rigour as formal assessment, you can share your achievement with friends, family and employers, and on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn. You might like to include your badges or statement of participation on your CV as evidence of self-directed learning.

Badges are a great motivator, helping you to reach the end of the course. Gaining a badge often boosts confidence in the skills and abilities that are needed for successful study. So, completing this course might encourage you to think about taking other courses.

There is one badge you can collect from this course:

OpenLearn - Planning a better future
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.