<< Background >>Covid-19 epidemic has created new challenges for the development of Smart and Sustainable Cities. It has been proven that it is not sufficient anymore just to focus on providing services for quality of life, or for a better business ecosystem, but we need to prepare cities, so that they are able to manage, adapt, maintain and ensure city services and enhance the quality of life in the event of hazards, shocks, and stresses. Following this concept analysis, resilience does not include only earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. but also whatever disrupts significantly the operation of a city either occasionally or periodically as well. Examples include high unemployment; endemic violence; health epidemics and chronic food and water shortages. Even though some standards and projects exist in this area, we have not yet reached a consensus on a common city resilience model that will able to describe what exactly constitutes resilience and how a city becomes resilient. Furthermore, up to now, little emphasis has been given to the way municipalities are organized for addressing hazards; and even less on training the personnel on the new skills required. Currently, these new required job competences do not exist, they are overlooked, or they are partially described. Rockefeller Foundation, in 2013 founded the “100 Resilient Cities (100RC)” project, having as key objective to help cities face three major threats and challenges: urbanization, globalization, and climate change. In parallel, other projects e.g. “Smart DevOps competencies for smart cities” (devops.uth.gr) are attempting to define the required skills and job profiles needed for Smart and Sustainable Cities professionals. According to our point of view, a new job profile named “Smart CIty Resilience Officer - SCRO” needs to be defined, which will sufficiently describe the required competences for facing these needs in the context of smart cities. This is because cities are becoming smarter and smarter and while this transformation creates more threats for cities’ resilience (e.g. cyberattacks), it also puts more arrows in the quiver of future cities on the road to achieve satisfactory levels of resilience (e.g. GIS monitoring). Apparently, we need to address the competences gap between current and desirable future competences of the municipalities workforce by emphasizing on these emerging needs. Exactly on this subject area, this technical report presents the results of a survey that attempts to define the required skills for the “Smart and Resilience City Officer”.At the same time, Europe 2020 strategy set the use of innovative, digital, and flexible learning as the means to increase employability, boost growth and enhance innovation and competitiveness across the EU. Europe 2020 strategy identifies the need to address the lack of sufficient digital transformation skills and competences in general, but as well to target the shortage in skills needed for making cities resilient, while at the same time developing innovative learning and teaching practices, for boosting the end result.The proposed project is targeting to fulfill the above-described societal and cities' needs that are considered both significant and necessary especially after the current COVID-19 crisis, which proved that European societies were not sufficiently prepared. Furthermore, this need is evident as it is suggested by recent reports, studies and surveys.<< Objectives >>CRISIS project relates to the Horizontal priority “Addressing digital transformation through development, resilience, and capacity” as it targets a shortage in digital and transferrable skills identified in resilience officers of smart cities municipalities. It will develop a new job profile for Smart City Resilient Officers (SCROs) and it will design, develop and deliver a pilot training program to certify the first cohort of SCROs. It proposes a holistic approach for the professional development of trainees envisioning to enrich their fan of competences and increase their employability on the basis of actual competence gaps and. It addresses the situation driven by the COVID-19 crisis, which has heavily impacted education by accelerating the need for individual flexibility and the ever-increasing demand for digital skills.Secondly, CRISIS project relates to sectoral priority “Stimulating innovative learning and teaching practices”, and it will design and implement a learner-centered curriculum, an objective that will be better achieved through flexible learning journeys enabled by the curriculum’s modular structure. Following, market needs analysis done as a preparation activity for this project, the selected competences of the SCRO job profile will be analyzed on a Learning Outcomes (LO) basis translating needs into assessable outcomes for learners. The LO-based approach will facilitate the shift from the conventional teacher-centered learning model to the learner-centered approach and ensure compliance with the labor market’s commands reducing skill mismatches. Moreover, to support learners in efficiently achieving the identified learning outcomes, CRISIS will rely on a Learning Journey Design (LJD) tool that will be developed to determine the appropriate educational strategy for each learner (why, what, and how to learn). Therefore, CRISIS will focus on implementing trans-disciplinary approaches and novel pedagogical models including contemporary approaches such as concept mapping, problem-solving, group-based, project-based, peer, and participatory learning in order to engage, inspire, motivate, and stimulate learners throughout the learning process.Upon its completion, the project will help to accelerate the HEIs transformation throughout Europe, in order to train the future generations in co-creating knowledge for a resilient, inclusive, and sustainable society and cities. This project will have a positive impact on the individuals in developing key competences, the municipalities that hire or will hire them, and finally on a much larger scale in European cities that want to develop resilience capacity.Overall the objectives of CRISIS project are concrete, important, and numerous:a) Provide in a structured and systematic way a framework for educating smart cities staff on resilience, a need that recently was proven of paramount importance, b) Develop an innovative curriculum for SCROs (currently there is non available),c) Provide innovative learning tools,d) Close the competence and skills gap for municipalities officials,e) Promote the European Collaboration on smart cities’ education,f) Increase the awareness of the Member States, Local Authorities, Municipalities and of various stakeholders that resilience of smart cities is a complex and difficult to acquire competences,g) Build-up on important work delivered from other ERASMUS+ projects, such as SmartDevOps project.<< Implementation >>CRISIS project mainly focuses on improving digital, transferrable, resilience, and smart city-related competences of people interested in seeking job opportunities and careers as Smart City Resilience Officers (SCROs). The need for such trained personnel will grow rapidly in the next few years as more and more cities are becoming digitalized and interconnected. At the same time, growing urbanization, globalization, and climate change constitute three major threats that demand effective resilience strategies and mechanisms. The project activities are to:a) Develop a self-assessment tool to identify learning gaps in SCRO competences and determine individual learning experiences and traits. b) Implement a tool to design learning journeys tailored to the city-specific needs and the individual competence level.c) Realize a modular SCRO curriculum that will facilitate flexible learning paths.The CRISIS curriculum will reflect the vision and intentions of this project. In order to meet this objective, the curriculum for the new job profile will be developed aiming at people interested in seeking job opportunities and careers as SCROs. An overview of what the curriculum document will contain is the following: Curriculum information, Learning Outcomes, Competences Outline, and Content Design, Competences Dependencies and Schedule, Competences Assessment policy, Curriculum policies, Learning journeys, etc.d) Produce digital OERs for the SCRO competences:In order to implement and deliver the curriculum designed, the CRISIS Training Kit (TK) needs to be developed which will include all appropriate objects required for the delivery of the course. The TK will address modules that support skills in the following main areas:1) transversal skills (e.g., crisis management, decision making and problem-solving, e.t.c.), 2) smart city planning and organizational skills (e.g., smart city stakeholder management and citizen engagement, smart city standards for resilience, e.t.c.), 3) resilient management skills (e.g., risk assessment and quantification, evaluating smart city assets e.t.c) including risk response planning and effective disaster response (e.g., smart city response planning, coordination of critical systems, e.t.c.)., and 4) business and financial management skills (e.g., planning financial recovery programs).The training modules supported by digital OERs will lead to the development of at least 20 core competences from the aforementioned areas that the CRISIS project will deliver.e) Create different teaching and learning activities to address a range of learning needs and stylesf) Develop an integrated online platform with adaptivity mechanisms to tailor the teaching and learning process to individual learning goals and strategies. The platform most probably will be based on moodle LMS with custom tools and mechanisms to reflect the needs of the individual learning journeys.g) Pilot the SCRO curriculum in 4 project countries with participants from smart cities and from the project associate partners and produce the first cohort of certified SCROs. One main objective is to certify the first cohort of SCRO in four partner countries. This action will increase the awareness that resilience competences are needed if we have to achieve resilience for our cities.h) Evaluate and update CRISIS tools, methodologies, platform, curriculum, learning material, and pilot course to identify inadequacies and best practices- Promote, disseminate and exploit the results at national and European levels.<< Results >>The tangible results of the CRISIS project are:•Reports: report on required SCROs’ competences based on the needs analysis conducted during the preparation of the project proposal (PR2). The project will also produce reports for the curriculum design (PR2), the instructional planning and development methodology (PR3), the evaluation results of the pilot phase (PR4), as well as dissemination and exploitation plans including roadmaps (PR5).•Methodologies: A novel pedagogical approach will be explored determining impactful teaching and learning activities (PR1), while an instructional design methodology for producing learning-outcome based training content that will synthesize a modular high-quality curriculum will be used (PR3).•Curriculum: A competence-based curriculum for SCROs will be developed following the needs analysis (PR2). For each competence, learning outcomes (knowledge and skills) will be defined. This approach enables the dynamic composition of the SCRO curriculum to provide a high degree of flexibility and address diverse professional needs and market requirements.•Digital content: Digital OERs that support the acquisition of approximately 20 competencies (PR3), such as digital, resilience, management, and smart city competences. ESCO, eCF, and other standards will be considered as a source of competences.•Online platform and courses: An online learning platform to mediate the learning process providing flexibility in learning paths and adaptability to different educational strategies will be realized. A course for acquiring the SCRO competences will be piloted to all partner countries (PR4), with the ability to be re-offered after project completion.•Tools: A self-assessment tool to identify SCRO competence gaps and learner profiles and a learning journey design tool to determine the educational goals and strategy for each learner defining what to learn, why and how to do it will be designed and developed (PR1).•Dissemination materials in English, Greek, Portuguese and German languages, the project website, and scientific publications (PR5).•Awareness-raising, promotion, and exploitation events in all participating countries (PR5).The intangible outcomes expected are:A) For the participating organizations (HEIs)•Sharing of knowledge, experiences, and ideas that will add value both to the project products and to the improvement of processes at the partners’ organizations•Creation of links and associations with an extended network of smart cities to gain a wider understanding of their actual needs in expertise and training programs and establish cooperations for running training programs•Improvement in the quality of teaching in a digital era through the design of new learning approaches, practices and solutions •Utilization of the new training content, material and platform for the improvement of online training delivery practicesB) For learners•Broadening of employment and career prospects as SCROs, an emerging job profile that will be part of future cities•Gaining an international perspective of the sector and exchanging experiences with peers•Increased engagement levels through adaptive educational environments that encompass contemporary teaching and learning processes•Keeping up with new and ongoing developments and improving conditions for innovation, growth and creativityC) For other stakeholders (Smart city authorities etc.)•European authorities will gain important information for ESCO, eCF, EQF in a dynamically evolving sector, while national authorities will also gain input for the (re)formulation of policies and practices at a national level•Policymakers, employment, and certification organizations will become timely aware of emerging job role profiles•Smart city authorities will have the opportunity to upskill their personnel, improve their impact at local and national levels and establish international partnerships.