SkillDisplay - X Marks the Spot in Education

Thanks to Christina from SkillDisplay for sharing!

Our goal is to support education and make it possible for everyone to get involved. SkillDisplay marks the spot in professional skill management, where learners, educators, business persons, and certifiers get together. Through the connection of educators and business persons, valuable partnerships are evolved as teachers/trainers can prepare their students with future skills that are needed, and employers can meet their future employees. Read on to get more information on how to support educators and the SkillDisplay project.

The topics in this blogpost cover:

• Open Source TYPO3 Extension
• TYPO3 x update
• Supporting the open-source efforts
• Public, private, and flexible solutions
• Become part of the developer network!

By extending the CMS with the skill management functionality, we want to make TYPO3 even more appealing for educators and trainers. Currently universities, schools, and companies can use the public SkillDisplay platform, or let the SkillDisplay GmbH host SkillDisplay as a Service on a private server. Now, however, we have two exciting new ways to further support education:

Open Source TYPO3 Extension

With the end of the Erasmus+ project in September 2020, the SkillDisplay extension will be freely available to everyone. This aims to enlarge the community not only for the extension, but also TYPO3, as we provide the ability to implement skill management on every TYPO3 website. Another reason for making the extension public is to gain from the community, involving more skill portfolios in the future. Everyone who wants to have a ready to use version with no need to implement and host their own instance, can use either the public SkillDisplay platform as an educator or business person, or use SkillDisplay as a Service.

TYPO3 X update

The SkillDisplay platform, as well as the extension, will be updated to TYPO3 10. We have chosen to use TYPO3 as it comes with lots of handy features including user management. Translation handling is integrated into the content management system and doesn’t need to be additionally added. We are also able to make good use of standard enterprise content management system features that are also part of the TYPO3 related SkillSets. If you haven’t registered yet and want to test the platform and see the skills, you can now also use the platform as a guest user. 

• content elements: https://my.skilldisplay.eu/skill/15/0 
• templates: https://my.skilldisplay.eu/skill/122/37 
• extensions: https://my.skilldisplay.eu/skill/202/24 

Furthermore, there are Service Level Agreements from TYPO3, which is not only handy for our platform, but for everyone who wants to host their own SkillDisplay instance.

Reasons

• New skills from industry experts: By supporting the SkillDisplay project, you contribute to us ensuring new skills are made available created in cooperation with industry experts and are included on the platform on a regular basis. 
• New features: The platform will benefit from new features, such as the new public profiles where SkillDisplay can be used to show skills possessed by the user. The public profile can be activated by every user and looks similar to Christina’s profile.
• Custom skill management: Given the soon freely available open-source nature of SkillDisplay, it can be easily adapted to many custom in-house skill management solution packages, while still retaining the core functionality, easily used by learners in the public sector, such as those in schools and universities. 
• Your logo on the SkillDisplay platform: Endorsement will also further expose your commitment to social responsibility, with the featuring of your company logo on the SkillDisplay website partner page.

Available partnerships

Partnerships to support SkillDisplay are available for business persons and educators, where business persons can choose a package (2, 3 or 4 star) that includes an upgrade for the educational partnership and therefore support institutions such as a school or university. The upgrade can be applied to an educational institution that is registered for a free 1 star partnership. The focus is on achieving partnerships in geographical proximity.

Public

The public SkillDisplay platform currently offers TYPO3 skills for editors, integrators, and developers. In the near future skills for web technology and project management, including Scrum and the waterfall model, are planned. The public version is there for everyone who wants to use existing skills and can be used for free by learners. For educators and business persons, the above-mentioned partnerships are available for the verification of students and employees.

Private

SkillDisplay is also available as a service, where a private instance is hosted. Use cases might be in-house training or school/university intern skills, where internal skills can be created according to demand. SkillDisplay workshops are there for help in using the platform in the most efficient way.

Flexible solutions

For customers that want to use SkillDisplay together with their existing learning platform and therefore, need an extension, we want to create a developer network/agency network. TYPO3 experts can then take over those tasks and work together with the customers to get their flexible solutions. If you are interested and already want to take a look at what is possible with the API, the SkillDisplay phptoolkit is available here.

If you are interested in developing flexible solutions for customers, feel free to message SkillDisplay with the subject line developer network.