Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: Governance
Why in news?
- The Government is developing the Electronic Skill Credential Standard (ESCS) Specification.
About:
- Directorate General of Training (DGT), Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship proposes to issue digital ‘e-Credentials / e-Certificates’ which are freely portable for candidates and easily verifiable at scale by employers and job matching platforms but continue to allow print and other visual forms for human consumption.
- This would enable candidates to verifiably state their skill levels with a high degree of trust in authenticity to aggregators, matchers, and employers. Now in the DGT ecosystem, all the certificates are ‘e-
Certificates’, digitally signed.
e-Credentials:
- e-Credentials are an electronic scheme-based standard for describing credentials data in a machine-readable format (JSON-LDrepresentation of RDFa- Resource Description Framework, a web standard) along with its printable human-friendly version to make credential exchange between digital agents open and reliable.
- Certificates issued according to this specification can be aligned to one or more educational standards.
They are secured using digital signatures. - These will also be pushed in DigiLocker.
- This standard is an open standard, free to use, and does not cost anything extra to the Government or the student.