Designing agile pathways for climate adaptation skill development

Capacity building for advancing climate-change leadership has become a critical workforce development requirement for both professionals and front-line workers. As the World Economic Forum Jobs 2020 report noted, there is an increasing need to provide short-timeframe opportunities for reskilling and upskilling that will keep step with the increasing issues of the climate crisis. Micro-credentials have been proposed as a strategy to enable the ongoing development of knowledge and skills to address this workforce development requirement, which we examine in the context of a university initiative that has prototyped skill pathways to address key climate adaptation themes.We report and discuss the strategic use of the Climate Adaptation Competency Framework (2020)–a Creative Commons-licensed (CC) open competency framework–along with the use of open educational resources to create agile pathways to skill development for climate adaptation and action. The pathways we have designed and are testing combine self-directed learning resources, individual and group activities, and authentic assessment practices to validate skill development. Micro-credentials are awarded from a university continuing and professional studies division to learners from multiple practice domains for demonstrations of competence.