Abstract:

Accelerating climate change and the associated green shift are reshaping labour markets, governance structures, and educational priorities across Europe. While ambitious policy frameworks have been established to support sustainable transitions, a persistent mismatch remains between existing workforce competences and those required to implement systemic change. Transitions toward climate-neutral and resilient societies demand competences that enable individuals and organizations to navigate complexity, uncertainty, and multi-actor collaboration. Educational institutions therefore face the challenge of developing competence programmes that respond to emerging transition needs.

This paper presents findings from the Erasmus+ cooperation partnership in vocational education and training Symbiosis, which explored competence development for the green shift across three regional contexts: Bergen (Norway), Vechta (Germany), and Groningen (Netherlands). These regions represent distinct transition challenges, including renewable energy expansion, agricultural transformation, and large-scale building retrofitting. Examining these contexts enabled the identification of shared competence needs while remaining grounded in concrete regional transition processes.

The study adopted a participatory action research approach combining stakeholder engagement, empirical data collection, and iterative validation. Regional stakeholders from education, industry, and the public sector were engaged to identify transition-related challenges and associated competence gaps within their respective sectors. These insights were complemented by a review of transition competence literature and European frameworks such as EntreComp. Based on this analysis, the project developed an Enabling Transitions Competence Programme addressing both workforce skills and organizational capacity-building needs. The first dimension focuses on individual and team-level competences, such as inter-disciplinary collaboration, facilitation, collective sensemaking, and adaptive leadership. The second concerns the enhancement of organizational capabilities required to guide and man-age transition processes, including systems thinking, adaptive governance, and stakeholder coordination.

In addition to the conceptual framework, the project produced a set of educational modules and practical tools designed to support competence development across higher education and professional training contexts. These outputs collectively constitute a repository of learning resources intended to support educators, practitioners, and policymakers involved in regional transition processes.

Evidence from the three regional contexts indicates that transition-related competences can-not be effectively addressed through isolated technical training, but require integrated educational approaches that connect individual skill development with organizational and systemic capacity building. The proposed competence framework and accompanying educational resources provide practical guidance for the design of curricula and training pro-grammes aimed at supporting sustainable societal transitions. Future research may further explore how such competence programmes can be embedded within institutional structures and scaled across different regional and sectoral contexts.

Keywords:

Transition competences, Green transition, Vocational education and training (VET), education for sustainability, Capacity building, Participatory Action research, Regional learning ecosystems, Industry-education alignment.