Our Role
To support SPC, our consultants were contracted to review and develop the suite of Resilience Qualifications for the Pacific, with consideration of learner, employer, and industry needs. This involved the review of existing Resilience Qualifications at Levels 1-4 and the development of new Resilience Qualifications at Levels 5-6. These qualifications aimed to set a consistent educational standard for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (resilience) across the Pacific.
The usefulness, relevance and value of qualifications is directly linked with the workforce and skill needs of individuals, groups of learners, employers, industry, and communities.
Our Approach
To create the qualifications, we conducted the following activities:
Stakeholder coordination and engagement to bring together a representative and informed set of voices and expertise from islands, organisations, and resilience disciplines across the Pacific. This included experts from a wide variety of educational, technical, government and national backgrounds.
Virtual and hybrid meeting facilitation to create discussion and build consensus on the common skills and knowledge needed by resilience professionals across the Pacific from a foundational to diploma level.
Qualification advice to recommend methodologies, formats, and structures for the qualifications that meet the needs of resilience professionals, assure quality for all graduates, and allow the flexibility of content and delivery needed for a diverse group of educational institutions and Pacific nations.
Writing the qualifications and undertaking further stakeholder consultation to ensure they continued to accurately reflect their needs. In doing so, we created a sector-endorsed suite of qualifications that specify the skills and knowledge of resilience workers at stair-cased levels of competence.
Qualification accreditation preparation to align the qualifications to the requirements of the Pacific Qualifications Framework and prepare them for submission to and approval by the Educational Quality and Assessment Programme.
The Outcomes Achieved
Accredited on the Pacific Qualifications Framework, the qualifications developed provide a pan-regional suite of qualifications aligned to the current and future needs of resilience professionals throughout the Pacific. In particular, the qualifications aim to
(i) further professionalise workers in resilience through regional recognition and accreditation,
(ii) open new doors for current resilience professionals to advance in their respective field, and
(iii) provide an avenue for non-professional volunteers, workers, and other relevant individuals to pursue a career in the resilience sector.
The qualifications developed provide the consistency to benchmark the skills and knowledge required of resilience professionals. They also incorporate the flexibility for content and delivery necessary for the diverse needs of educational institutions and nations of the region.
By ensuring these qualifications are aligned to the needs of the sector and set a consistent educational standard for the region, SPC aims to strengthen the capacity of the Pacific to reduce the risk of disasters and adapt to climate change.
Development of a Pan-Regional Suite of Qualifications on Climate Change Resilience
The Situation
The Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change and Resilience (PACRES) project is an EU funded, joint initiative to ensure better regional and national adaptation and mitigation responses to climate change challenges faced by Pacific countries. The Pacific Community’s (SPC) responsibility as part of this project is to build the capability of the region to share information, results and knowledge about climate action, and the capacity to mitigate and adapt to climate change.