Digital competences of teachers at vocational institutions and universities of applied sciences will be supported by digital open badges to a greater extent in the future. Various digital pedagogical competence frameworks have been developed to support professional teachers’ effective and meaningful criterion-based professional development of digital pedagogical competences. European frameworks published in recent years outline how a digitally competent educational organisation (DigCompOrg) and digitally competent teaching staff (DigCompEdu) should look, encouraging organisations to ensure competences of their staff and to develop national solutions to ensure digital competence.

In this study, we investigated how digital open badges developed for teaching personnel in Finland correspond with these European frameworks. This article presents a case study showing how digital open badges for Finnish teachers’ digital competence correspond to the standardised DigCompEdu framework. This qualitative study used a deductive content analysis to discern relationships between the data and the existing frameworks and to quantify phenomena. The results indicate that Finnish teachers’ badges best correspond to the digital learning environment as well as to teaching and learning. However, the developed badges correspond only marginally to the following competence descriptions: areas of assessment, learner empowerment and the facilitation of digital competence.