Digital Credentialing Platform

Note, this is a contract award notice and not a call for competition.

Education and Training Foundation (ETF) would like to award a contract for the provision of a digital credentialing platform.

ETF is the professional body for the Further Education and Skills workforce in England, supporting more than 134,000 professionals across over 4,000 organisations.

ETF supports the workforce through:

• Professional Standards
• Professional development programmes
• Recognition of professional status
• Membership and professional community

ETF used to operate its membership body services through the Society for Education and Training (SET) brand. In early 2026, ETF undertook a major brand repositioning, integrating SET fully into ETF and establishing ETF as the single professional body for the FE and Skills workforce.

As part of this repositioning:

• Membership and professional recognition will sit under the ETF brand
• Digital credentials will be used to recognise membership, professional status and professional learning achievements
• ETF intends to retrospectively issue digital credentials for recent achievements, helping to establish a visible ecosystem of ETF-recognised credentials across the workforce.

ETF is implementing a new digital ecosystem including:

• BlueCMS – built on Umbraco
• BlueCRM – built on Microsoft Dynamics

ETF conducted proportionate pre-market engagement to identify suppliers with demonstrable capability in shareable and verifiable digital credentialing that will integrate into our digital ecosystem and meet strict GDPR, data and privacy requirements.

Process:

Following ETF's internal procurement policy, three suppliers were asked to complete a request for quotation. ETF sought a digital credentialing platform capable of supporting automated issuing, secure credential management and shareable professional recognition.

Suppliers were asked to:

1. outline their approach when working with external system integrators

2. provide details of documentation and technical support provided

3. provide details of any additional professional services costs or rate cards

4. provide details of their pricing based on expected volumes

5. detail three key reasons why their platform would be the best fit for ETF

6. provide two high-level case studies

7. provide details of platform functionality, including:

• single sign-on
• CRM Integration and Automated issuing
• Retrospective/ Bulk Issuing
• Badge/ Credential Design
• Stackable Credentials
• Credential Lifecycle Management
• Organisational Credentials
• White-Label and earner experience
• Credential Wallets and earner accounts
• Credential Ownership and Portability
• Integration with ETF Member Portal (Umbraco)
• Reporting and Analytics
• Security, Data Hosting and Privacy.

A contract was awarded to the supplier that best met ETF's requirements.