Practical overview | Digitally-signed credentials

Europass digitally-signed credentials will be tamperproof and made up of five elements:

  • Information about the awarding body;
  • information about the person receiving the credential;
  • information about the learning achievement represented by the credential;
  • a visual representation of the achievement; and
  • an eIDAS compliant digital signature (e-Seal).

 

Screen shot of how a Europass Digital credential would look like and the information it could have

 

How does it work?

Daniel graduated with a degree in political science from a French university. He is now applying for a job with an Irish company to gain international work experience.

If Daniel uses paper-based certificates

It is likely that Daniel would have had to contact his university to receive an original certificate, and also have it notarized. This process would take some weeks, and incur significant costs. After this, he would need to submit the degree to the Irish company in person, and the Irish company would then need to check its authenticity and manually translate it.

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icons representing how the process of digitally-signeed credentials work

If Daniel uses the new Europass

He would automatically receive his degree as a digitally signed credential as soon as he graduated. The new Europass would automatically verify both that the university was authorized to issue such a degree, and that Daniel is the intended recipient. Daniel would then store this credential either on his own device or in his Europass profile. On applying for a job with the Irish company, he would merely create a sharing link from his Europass profile, and submit this to the company. They would instantly receive all the information in the credential, together with an automatically generated confirmation of its validity and authenticity, as well as the ability to machine-translate it. Daniel retains the right to revoke access to his information at any time. For both, Daniel and the company, the process of application is reduced from a few weeks to a few seconds, all while maintaining privacy and guaranteeing authenticity of the process.