Docs · Credentials
Five tiers, earned by evidence
GenBodha credentials are issued automatically based on what you actually do — labs you pass, exams you complete, capstones you ship, and real-world code you understand. Every credential is cryptographically signed and verifiable in seconds, without trusting our servers.
Rolling out
The credentialing system is being progressively enabled. The criteria and verification mechanics described here are the final shape; if your dashboard doesn't yet show issued credentials, that's expected — your evidence (labs, quizzes, exams) is still being recorded and will count toward your tier the moment issuance turns on.
The ladder
Professional
You finished the full discipline, passed the cumulative final, and shipped a capstone.
Distinguished
Professional or Expert across multiple disciplines, with sustained activity and teaching evidence.
Tiers are per-discipline (except Distinguished, which is cross-discipline). You can hold different tiers in different disciplines at the same time.
Foundational
The "I've completed one full course" credential. Lowest bar, widest reach.
Associate
You've completed your discipline's anchor sequence — the foundational courses that establish core competence.
Professional
The discipline is fully complete and you've shipped a capstone. This is what employers should treat as "trained on the curriculum."
Expert
Professional plus demonstrable engagement with real-world ecosystem code. Three independent paths — any one suffices, and Professional is a prerequisite for all of them.
Path A · OSS depth
Path B · Attestation
Path C · Proctored live assessment
All three paths require anti-fraud clearance on the underlying evidence trail.
Distinguished
The breadth + community contribution credential. Rare by design.
How your credential is signed
Every learning event you generate — a passed lab, a completed quiz, a shipped capstone, a passed OSS unit — becomes a signed entry in your evidence record. When the entries on your record cross a tier threshold, our promotion service automatically issues a W3C Verifiable Credential.
The credential is signed with an Ed25519 key held in Google Cloud KMS. We rotate the key annually and publish the matching public key at genbodha.ai/.well-known/did.json. No human ever "grants" you a tier.
How verifiers check it
A recruiter, ATS, or LinkedIn integration pastes your credential URL or JSON into our verifier widget — or runs the verification themselves using any standards-compliant W3C VC library.
- They fetch our public key once from
/.well-known/did.json. - They verify the signature locally — no call to our servers needed.
- They check the revocation bitstring (only call to us during the entire verification).
- They get a yes/no in under 2 seconds.
If we tampered with the credential, the math fails. If you tampered with it, the math fails. That's the point.
Why credentials can expire in place
Expert and Distinguished both have rolling time windows on their evidence (18 months for Expert, 18 months for Distinguished). If your OSS activity stops or your discipline content goes stale, the higher credentials drop back to Professional until the evidence trail is current again.
This is a feature, not a bug: it protects the signal value over time. A 5-year-old "Expert in AI Agent Engineering" credential would mean something very different from a current one. Rolling windows make sure the credential reflects what you can do now.