New Economy Skills Unlocking the Human Advantage 2025

CASE STUDY 2 PwC: badging human-centric fluency Context: PwC has built a global framework to accredit learning and skills across its 340,000 people, recognizing human-centric capabilities to make progress visible, portable and understood across teams and markets. The portfolio includes badges such as Inclusive Mindset, which develops awareness of bias, intersectionality and micro- inequities while fostering curiosity and empathy. Issued via Credly, these digital credentials serve as verified, shareable records. The PwC Professional framework defines expected behaviours and anchors development to how work is delivered as well as what gets done – placing human-centric skills on par with technical expertise and business outcomes. Approach: Credentialling sits within a wider upskilling model. Starting with PwC’s “New world. New skills.” programme, PwC’s skills journey supports continuous learning at scale and places an emphasis not only on the technical skills required of the workforce but also the human skills that are foundational to how PwC delivers outcomes, lives its values and demonstrates its purpose. The PwC Professional behaviours define the standard that leaders and managers use to evaluate performance, coach and develop others, provide in-the-moment feedback, and support staffing decisions. Some business units across the PwC network reinforce what’s learned through badging via practice-based experiences, such as empathy-building interventions, so that learning translates into observable behaviour. Together, these mechanisms create consistent expectations, evidence- based reporting and repeatable recognition paths for human- centric skills. PwC badges are learning curricula across a range of strategically important topics, with transparent criteria that require learning, application and assessment. For human- centric badges like Inclusive Mindset, participants complete curated learning, reflect on their role in creating inclusive environments and demonstrate practical steps to shift everyday interactions. Some member firms have even made the Inclusive Mindset curricula a requirement for new joiners. Each individual’s learning is reviewed before a verifiable credential is issued, enabling individuals to share validated achievement internally and externally. Results: Individuals gain recognition for behaviours to not only acquire technical knowledge, but to benefit their client work. Badges signal strengths in communication, collaboration and inclusion – 90.9% of badge earners agreed that it improved their ability to practice more inclusive behaviours in daily interactions – supporting confidence and mobility across service lines and geographies. Managers use verified evidence of skills rather than course completions as one factor in staffing decisions, and teams benefit from clearer expectations about how to work together. At the firm level, aggregated badge data provides a view of capability supply that informs investment, while a common language for human-centric performance strengthens culture and delivery quality. In this case, PwC embeds human-centric capability in the same evidence-based way it treats technical skills, to recognize the value of both essential skill types. The result is a practical credentialling model that supports trust, inclusion and consistent outcomes in complex, real-world settings. New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage 32