Greener Skills: How Credentials Create Value in the Clean Energy Economy.

Congratulations to Sarah White and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy for giving us a clear pathway through the puzzling credentialing network.  Its recommendations will be a major contributor to ensuring a qualified “green” workforce.

Jane Weissman, Executive Director

The Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) has just released Greener Skills: How Credentials Create Value in the Clean Energy Economy.  The follow up to Greener Pathways, Greener Skills outlines an American skills agenda and calls for a better, stronger, greener workforce system to support it.

Greener Skills reaches into a throng of competing skills benchmarks that differ by industry, employer, and training provider, and lifts up leading examples of standardization. These include both established national certifications and local credentialing efforts that could be used as a system model, particularly at the entry level.

Greener Skills outlines key early steps toward a national credentialing system, describing the core array of certifications and skill standards for workers in clean energy sectors and providing a set of policy recommendations to help move this work in a more consistent direction.  COWS’s purpose, however, is larger: to suggest a more rational framework for human capital development in a greening economy, and to make the case for a national policy of portable, transparent, industry-specific credentials — and state-supported pathways up to them.

In April, COWS and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) will gather experts and policy-makers to discuss the paper — and the future of post-secondary credentialing — at a roundtable in Washington DC.

You can download the report at www.cows.org/greenerskills.

March 29, 2010

Jane Pulaski