Have you heard about the new Diversity-Certified Badge? We announced them here in October. These badges empower our independent businesses who are Minority-owned (including Black-owned), Woman-owned, U.S. veteran-owned, Disability-owned, and LGBTQ+-owned to leverage their external certifications and help them win more of the work they love.
Supplier diversity is important to many businesses that value a diversity of perspectives and points of view. We are deeply committed to creating an inclusive future of economic opportunity on our platform. While we don’t ask our talent community for demographic information today, we have clients with diversity and inclusion initiatives that want to support underrepresented groups and actively seek out diverse talent to fill these goals through Upwork. These badges are a way for talent to show off their certifications and connect with clients.
We’re hosting a webinar on March 25th at 11am PST to share more details about diversity certification and the process behind it. We are also releasing other educational content around diversity certification over the coming months, so let us know if there are specific topics you would like us to cover.
We encourage our talent in the US who have certifications to add it to their profile. You can do so by clicking the + icon in the “Diversity certification” section of your profile. First, we ask you to provide your business name, Diversity category. Then you’ll provide information on the certification provider, type, certification number, and expiration date. Once all the details are entered and saved, the information will go into manual review for Upwork to validate your certification.
Please note: There is a different section of the profile for entering skill-based certifications like AWS, Google AdWords, etc. This has been a point of confusion, so we wanted to clarify these separate areas.
By adding your diversity certification information and details, you will receive a badge displayed on your profile visible to Enterprise Suite clients in search both through a “Diversity-Certified” filter and on the search result tiles.
Upwork is currently working with certifying bodies in the United States. We plan to expand to Canada in the coming months. We are starting with the U.S. because the guidelines for diversity certifications are clearly defined for U.S. businesses and we are more familiar with them.
Here’s a brief history lesson on how diversity certifications began: Supplier Diversity started in the U.S. in the 1960s as part of the American Civil Rights legislation when President John F. Kennedy amended a federal order to take affirmative action into consideration for federal contracting. As this movement continued to grow through the decades and expand into private corporate supplier diversity programs, other countries started to take notice. Canada pushed their Employment Equity Act in 1986, and the UK implemented a similar statute in 2000 for local governments.
We recognize there are other international certifications, and diversity can be defined differently in every country. That said, we're actively pursuing outreach with third-party organizations to broaden our geographic reach. If you know of a certifying agency in your country, please share it with us so we can look into them.
For additional information, check out our Help center article.