The International Academy for Transformation and the Environment (TES Academy) of the German Federal Environment Agency is responding to the massive demand for further educating and training of managers and decision-makers (professionals) in the context of sustainability. The TES Academy aims at promoting mutual learning activities for professionals within different organizations and sectors. Within the TESACADEV project (Development of an Evaluation Concept for Supporting the Competencies of the TES Academy) evaluation concepts for educational formats and trainings were investigated with regard to their applicability for TES. While there are some advanced academy approaches to enable and foster transformative learning (e.g., Moore et al. 2018), the concept remains ambitious and the state of research about evaluation of transformative learning processes or sustainability-related competencies as a result of such learning is not mature. For this reason, the paper’s focus is on the following research question: Which competencies do professionals need to contribute to social transformation processes and how can education formats and trainings aiming to strengthen these competencies be evaluated? To answer this question, different methods were applied: The first step was to conduct a systematic literature review following the PRISMA guidelines (Page et al. 2020) on professional development and sustainability-related competencies. Papers about educational formats and trainings for educators have been excluded within this review. The results yield a set of relevant competencies that complement previous competence models (Foucrier/ Wiek 2019, Lozano et al. 2017, Redman/ Wiek 2021, Salgado et al. 2018). In a second step, existing academies for the development of sustainability-related professional competences were identified and their education and evaluation concepts were surveyed using expert interviews. In a third step, two workshops of the TES Academy were accompanied in the context of a participant observation. Thematically, these workshops were related to the two overarching concepts of resilience (December 2022) and corruption (February 2023). The results include a map of different evaluation approaches for the TES that take into account different aspects like the participants’ backgrounds, the methods applied or the facilitators’ ability to accompany the learning processes.

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