Goals of the Trail Skills Project
- Promote workforce development of current and future trail professionals
- Advance trails training opportunities and development
- Provide increased opportunities to connect trail volunteers, stewards, agency staff, and professionals
- Define a pathway to a career in trails and inspire the next generation of trail professionals
- Bolster the capacity of volunteers to meet stewardship needs
How it works:
What an individual can do on the Trail Skills Project:
- Highlight your trail expertise
- Identify your trail professional development goals
- Find training opportunities to meet those goals
- Find job opportunities
- Connect to trail-related organizations, companies, and agencies
What organizations, companies, and agencies can do on the Trail Skills Project:
- Identify the professional development needs of your staff through the creation of individual profiles
- Find trails training opportunities to match the needs of your staff
- Post job opportunities
- Individual profiles of jobseekers creates a common ‘resume’ for review
- Find trail expertise to work on trail projects
What trails training providers can do on the Trail Skills Project:
- Share trails training opportunities with a nationwide audience
- Identify and fill gaps in trails training (topical and geographic)
- Align and match trail competencies with your program's learning objectives
- Build out quality curricula to meet the needs of the trails industry
The Trail Competency Framework is the foundation of the Trail Skills Project:
- Individual profiles use the trail competencies and skill level descriptions to self-identify individual expertise and gaps
- Trails trainings identify which elements of the Trail Competency Framework align with learning objectives
- Job descriptions can be generated and aligned with the trail competencies
Need for the Trail Skills Project
Because of:
- Increased pressure on trail systems due to increased use
- Maintenance backlog of existing trails
- Increased demand for new trails
- Lack of available workforce/volunteer-force to address the increased demand
- Workforce turnover with retirement
We need:
- Highly competent trail professionals across the field, which encompasses many job descriptions and demands the ability to demonstrate proficiency across several skills
- A trained and quality volunteer-force to amplify stewardship across public lands
- More consistent and quality trails training for both professionals and volunteers
- A clear pathway for the next generation to become fully engaged as a trail professional
- Shared language for efficient and effective communication between partners around trail project implementation, job descriptions, and training needs
Download the related presentation, Developing a Data-Driven Trail Competency Framework.
Trail Skills Collaborators
