Training Strategy
- We have a vision and plan for the difference we want to make for the conservation community
Conservation Professionals, Programmes and Potential:
Durrell’s Training Strategy 2020-2025.
The planet faces an unprecedented ecological crisis. Effective nature conservation programmes - and effective conservationists - are needed more than ever to save and recover wildlife and ecosystems. To meet this challenge, and overcome the many political, financial and social barriers in our way – conservationists need to better equipped to do more effective conservation.This means being better skilled, more knowledgeable, professional, more strategic, adaptable and resilient.
As a community of conservation professionals, we need to work more closely together to share ideas, knowledge and experiences, and help each other rise to this challenge.
We believe that conservationists deserve more accessible and higher quality training and professional development opportunities.
At Durrell, we are passionate about enabling conservation practitioners, and aspiring professionals, to acquire and share the competences needed to be more effective and to achieve career-goals.
We believe that conservationists need access to more training and longer-term professional development opportunities to grow their leadership abilities, as well as their professional and technical skills. We believe conservationists, and the conservation community as a whole, would benefit from more opportunities to come together to share experiences, challenges and ideas.
Our Vision: 'a global community of conservation professionals rewilding the world'.
We have set ourselves ambitious goals to achieve by 2025 to start to realise this vision. These include:
- 500 conservation professionals working more effectively in threatened species recovery
- 50 species-focussed conservation programmes in our priority regions - or on our priority species - are working more effectively
- 1,000 aspiring conservationists have been trained and provided early career support
Long-term and sustained professional development is essential for conservationists to acquire all the competences needed to be highly effective
To achieve these goals, we have developed a blended programme of specialist face-to-face, self directed and online training in both technical and professional skills. We are launching a new 2-year professional development programme for conservationists in the workplace, prioritising those working in Durrell’s priority regions or working on our priority species.
All these courses and programmes will be supported by our new online learning management system, a range of scholarships and an alumni support network.
We are launching a new programme which harnesses our institutional expertise in the best practice of adaptive management of conservation projects – the Conservation Standards. This programme will provide projects and organisations with strategic and technical guidance to help them become more effective.
Defining and measuring success is key in any effective strategy
The impact of our new strategy will be tracked through our sector-leading monitoring systems. We are working with an academic partner to conduct in-depth evaluations to ensure our training and professional development is making the difference we set out to achieve.
Empowering Effective Conservationists
Our NEW brochure – Empowering Effective Conservationists - sets out what we want to achieve through our Training work by 2025, and how we will go about it.
BY 2025, WE WANT TO SEE:
50
species-focused conservation programmes working more effectively
500
conservation professionals working more effectively in threatened species recovery
1,000
aspiring conservationists have been trained and provided with early career support