The Pilot
The ability to attract, retain, and develop world-leading talent will define Calgary’s future. How cities grow and develop their talent pool is crucial. Today's workplaces demand that people can live with uncertainty, adapt to new roles, and learn new skills quickly. These skills transcend industries and professions.
If there were such a thing as a defining skill, it would be adaptability.
At a city-level, Calgary’s adaptive capacity is anchored in the ability of its labour force to meet increasingly dynamic demands for new skills. Thus, our challenge is to develop citizens who can professionally thrive in a turbulent and dynamic world.
To accelerate Calgary's adaptive capacity, we must become a city that develops skills faster and better than others.
To support this, Calgary Arts Development Authority, in partnership with Calgary Economic Development, are prototyping a professional certification model in 2022.
This project is based on three questions:
Is there perceived value in a community skills certification system by employers, individuals, and talent developers?
Does community skills certification facilitate greater inclusivity by reducing employer dependency on informal methods?
Can the community skills certification model be sustainably scaled?
During fall 2022, the project team will assess the prototype outcomes compared to the three questions. If employers and those looking for a job see value in Trusted Skills, we will examine different approaches to future expansion.
Guiding Principles
Introducing a new professional skill certification system is exceptionally complex. Fortunately, numerous benchmarks support the development of the new Trusted Skills professional certification system.
Program examples include:
Red Seal Program for interprovincial trades
Islamic Banking & Finance Institute Malaysia
Nursing Council of New Zealand
Building on these and others, the Trusted Skills professional certification prototype is guided by five principles:
Principle 1: Bridging the Gap
Trusted Skills professional certification must be driven by current and emerging local labour market demand. Trusted Skills certification is designed to enable different professional fields to identify skill trust gaps and provide a consistent, efficient, scalable, and rigorous path to developing skill certification. The goal is to establish an agile certification system to bridge trust gaps, not compete with existing certification systems.
Principle 2: Decoupled Certification
Trusted Skills professional certification is decoupled from direct talent development pathways. The goal of Trusted Skills certification is to verify an individual’s skill level, by recognizing and unlocking the infinite pathways to developing this skill.
Principle 3: Trust & Legitimacy
The success or failure of all certifications is rooted in rigour, trust, and legitimacy. Therefore, the Trusted Skills professional certification processes, including establishing the criteria, the process to verify a skill, and the expertise of the Trusted Skills reviewer, will comply with ISO 17024 standard.
Principle 4: Scaffolded
Trusted Skills professional certification is scaffolded to recognize basic, advanced, and expert skills.
Principle 5: Accessible & Sustainable
Trusted Skills professional certification must be designed to be both accessible and sustainable. Accessibility reflects a need to ensure that Trusted Skills professional certification is open to all Calgarians, regardless of background or financial ability. Concurrently, the program must be designed to be economically sustainable. Economic sustainability is contingent on both individuals and employers perceiving value in Trusted Skills professional certification. Therefore, employers must recognize the value of a candidate having Trusted Skills professional certification during the hiring process, which generates an added incentive for an individual to invest in securing their Trusted Skills professional certification.
The Trusted Skills Professional Certification Model
Trusted Skills professional certification builds on this same principle — professionals certifying professionals. For employers, this means a job candidate has been assessed by a certified Trusted Skills reviewer that they have the skills they claim to have. For candidates, it means you’ve been certified in the skills you claim to have and that an employer needs.
The idea behind Trusted Skills professional certification is simple.
Your most valuable skills aren’t developed from one class at school, one job, or a book you read — they come from your life experiences. Trusted Skills professional certification knows we all took different paths. It doesn’t judge how you got to where you are; it only judges the skills at the end.
Trusted Skills professional certification allows candidate’s to prove their skills by submitting an ePortfolio embedding evidence in the form of videos, documents, samples, and projects. Certified reviewers in the field assess this evidence relative to the criteria. If a candidate meets these criteria, they are awarded a Trusted Skills professional certification by the Certifying Oversight Board.
Project Governance
The Trusted Skills project governance incorporates a project oversight board and the project governance committee.
Project Oversight Board
The Trusted Skills prototype is certification is governed by the project oversight board. This oversight board incorporates the Project Chairs, and designates from Calgary Arts Development, and Calgary Economic Development.
Project Governance Committee
The project governance committee is mandated to provide counsel for developing and deploying the Trusted Skills professional certification prototype between April and October 2022. The project governance committee comprises representative stakeholders, including employers, talent developers, professionals, and functional experts.
Driven by Community
Trusted Skills professional certification must be driven by current and emerging local labour market demand. Trusted Skills professional certification is designed to enable different professional fields to identify skill trust gaps and provide a consistent, efficient, scalable, and rigorous path to developing professional skill certification. A professional field is a group of people or organizations with a common professional interest, such as an industry (e.g., film) or occupation (e.g., digital marketers). The establishment of a new Trusted Skills professional certification can be initiated by any professional field that identifies a trust gap. If approved, a designated professional field is accountable for establishing an oversight committee responsible for developing and managing all aspects of their Trusted Skills professional certification. The establishment of a new Trusted Skill professional certification will follow the ten-steps process below.
Trusted Skills materials are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
