The following testimonial is part of a series of interviews conducted by the ESCO Secretariat with ESCO implementers.  Their purpose is to shed light on ESCO strengths and challenges as perceived by implementers so that current and potential future stakeholders can gain better knowledge on the use of ESCO. In this testimonial, we discuss how Open Educational Badges is leveraging ESCO.  

Tell us a bit more about your organization

Mycelia gGmbH is a German non-profit developing digital tools and infrastructure for competence-based recognition in non-formal and informal learning. Our Open Educational Badges (OEB) platform enables educators, training providers and corporates to create, issue, and manage digital credentials. Since 2023, the project has grown to include hundreds of issuing organisations with expanding connections to international partners and European educational ecosystems.

How do you leverage ESCO in your services and since when are you using it? 

Since 2023, ESCO has been at the core of the OEB platform. Every badge can be enriched with ESCO competencies, allowing issuers to describe the skills behind a learning experience in a standardised, machine-readable way. An AI-assisted badge editor was built which analyses free-text course descriptions and automatically suggests matching ESCO competencies. Learners can then see their badges aggregated into a personal competence profile (mapped directly to ESCO) giving them a clear, cross-institutional picture of their skills.

What were some of the challenges you encountered in implementing ESCO?

ESCO’s taxonomy is powerful, but it can be complex for non-specialist educators to navigate directly. Many of our issuing organisations found the vocabulary unfamiliar or not always sufficiently tailored to their specific learning contexts. ESCO also has some constraints when it comes to fully capturing rapidly emerging or transversal competences, such as those related to AI and broader “Future Skills.” To address these areas, we propose layering AI-assisted support on top of ESCO and building a community-validated folksonomy extension. This approach would enable users to propose and refine new competences in a flexible, bottom-up way, while remaining anchored to the ESCO core.

What is the key ingredient in ESCO that made you take the decision to use it in your system? 

Interoperability. For digital badges to have real value, a learner's credential from a youth workshop in Bavaria needs to be interpretable by an employer in Lisbon or a university in Paris. ESCO provided a ready-made, EU-wide semantic layer that no individual project could replicate from scratch. It also gave our issuing partners a structured scaffold rather than facing a blank page when defining competences, they had a framework to lean on and adapt.

What was the level of acceptance by your partners/other national stakeholders? 

Acceptance has grown steadily. Issuing organisations consistently reported in interviews and feedback sessions that ESCO-based competence descriptions gave their badges more credibility and reduced the effort of writing competence criteria from scratch. Partners such as MINTcampus, various German Bildungskommunen, and higher education institutions like TU Dresden and TH Lübeck engaged positively. International actors confirmed that ESCO integration significantly increases the scalability and cross-context relevance of the badge system.

What are some of your recommendations for other stakeholders looking to implement ESCO in their system? 

Start with a narrow, well-curated subset of ESCO relevant to your domain and work with matchings. Plan for extension: ESCO won't cover everything, and having a governed process for community additions is essential. Finally, pair ESCO integration with concrete learner use cases. The taxonomy only unlocks value when learners can see their competence profile and act on it.

How has ESCO helped your business/organisation? What are its advantages and disadvantages from your standpoint? 

European skills infrastructure. It enabled learner-facing features like aggregated competence profiles, learning path recommendations, and skill-gap visualisations that simply wouldn't be possible without a shared vocabulary. The main disadvantage is governance speed: ESCO updates slowly relative to the pace of emerging skill needs, particularly in areas like AI literacy or sustainability. We are in the process of mitigating this by treating ESCO as a stable core while building flexible extension layers around it.