Finding one's way from the middle out

We're liking IfATE's new occupational maps and green themes. It might be missing a trick or two, though.

First off, we’d like to record here our thanks to the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) for its response to our recent request for information. You see, the problem we were having was in compiling a list of all the dark green¹, mid green² and royal³ apprenticeships, short of going through the occupational maps one by one and seeing which standards had one or other of the little green icons marked up against them.

An email query to IfATE, though, elicited a fast response of just a day or two and we received by return a csv file listing 274 standards (444 when we count the variations) either approved, in development or being considered, which range from levels 2 to 7 and span nine of the fifteen occupational maps. As we might have expected the bulk of these are in Engineering and Manufacturing, Construction and the Built Environment, and Agriculture, Environmental and Animal care. But we see only a few in Transport and Logistics and none in Digital, which we found a little strange. We’ll touch on this point again later.

So, lots of fun ahead for data geeks like us. But here’s a question we found ourselves asking: other than sifting through the standards (like we do), how does this help those who have their minds set on embarking on – or crossing over to – a career in sustainability?

We hear from quite a few of the people we talk to who are either in a sustainability job or are looking for one that they got (or are getting) there through their own drive, without much guidance from, well, anywhere really. Take Elly Howe, Portsmouth International Port’s (PIP) Sustainability Coordinator. When we interviewed her for a Green Edge podcast episode last year, shortly after she took up the role, she described her track from wanting to be involved in sustainability to finding the job at PIP as being largely due to a big measure of feeling her own way. If you don’t want to listen to the full episode, the clip of our conversation with Elly is here (2m:23s):

Incidentally, in tracking PIP’s progress towards its target of being the UK’s first net carbon neutral port by 2030 we were interested to read recently that solar now provides the port with 35% of its electricity. Things seem to be proceeding nicely there.

But back to our train of thought. Is Elly an isolated case? We suspect not, and when we look at case studies like those we find in IEMA’s Green Careers Hub, we find plenty of examples of people crossing over into sustainability from careers like sales, accountancy and even from admin jobs in football clubs. One piece of advice we found in one of the case studies for anyone interested in a career in sustainability is this:

‘Learn about the sustainability path that interests you the most. There are so many different avenues you can take from waste management to water management, renewable energies, and agriculture etc. From there, find out what qualifications you would benefit from attaining to progress in that career choice and, if the opportunity presents itself, get experience’.

Source: IEMA Green Careers Hub

So, how does our csv file of IfATE standards help us find our avenue? Well, if it’s environment we care about, we do find clusters of standards around occupational groups like Environment technician, in which we learn we can go for qualifications as a Countryside worker (Level 2), Field biologist (3), Fisheries technician (3) or one of various types of Water environment worker (3). But how does that help if, say, we’re seeking to either make a career – or cross over into one – around this avenue we hear called ‘retrofit’? Answer: it probably doesn’t – we were somewhat disappointed to find that the csv file we got from the Institute doesn’t even include that particular word.

In fairness, though, IfATE is working on this and, while it’s not a top-level menu item on the website just yet, a scroll down to the bottom of the new occupational map page gives us a link to what the Institute calls its green themes. Here, IfATE tells us it has built on the initial work of the Green Jobs Taskforce and the subsequent work of the Green Jobs Delivery Group to allow users to quickly identify all occupations relevant to a particular green theme that might be of interest to them.

One of the green themes we find there is indeed retrofit, so that’s a step in the right direction. And here we find a dozen or so standards from the Construction and Built Environment map, including occupations like civil engineers and technicians, town planners, architects, construction site supervisors and managers, and building services engineering.

But, out of this list, who does what in the retrofit process? If, for example, we study the process laid out by the Retrofit Academy, we see roles for assessors, coordinators, designers, installers and evaluators, together with the stages for whole building retrofit defined in the PAS 2035 specification. Further, if fitting a heat pump, or linking to a future heat network perhaps, is part of a retrofit project – perhaps a big project involving, say, retrofit of a whole apartment block – then surely project management is a major part? We do find heat pumps (installation and maintenance) and heat networks (installation and maintenance) as other green themes, but project planning and management? We don’t see those in the themes and – only because we happen to know where to find them – we have to cross over to the Business and administration occupational map to find that.

Another thought: what about adding data analysts to the retrofit theme? We see data-driven approaches and energy modelling certainly being positioned as part of the (perhaps bigger) retrofit jobs. The standard for Data Analysts even includes the job title Energy data analyst, although strangely that doesn’t seem to qualify it for a place in the csv file we received. For that matter (as we said earlier) neither do any of the standards in the Digital occupational map, like AI Data Specialist, even though we read that AI is revolutionising waste management.

Image: Karuvadgraphy

We could go on and look for further omissions and inconsistencies, but that is not the point of this post. Having been involved in the early part of the occupational map process, we do know something about the direction and constraints IfATE was working under when the original maps were put together. We have also closely watched the fine work the Institute has done since, including the efforts it has made to describe progression paths between the standards⁴. Instead, our point is this: describing green themes in this way is a little too bottom-up to our way of thinking, like starting a house with a pile of bricks and no picture of the end product. We may have some kind of plan for each room and how, say, the bedrooms link to the family bathroom, but no real view of the finished house. So, perhaps not exactly bottom-up, but more like middle-out.

And that’s a pity, because we feel IfATE could be in a great position to show some thought leadership here in how careers in sustainability could progress in real terms, through matching real roles to the sometimes abstract titles in the occupational maps. Which could be of help to both early stage career-ers like Elly who are dead keen to get into it as well as the older folks who want – or need – to either cross over or get back in to the labour market.

And that’s before we even start to consider where innovation and emerging technologies get fed into the qualifications and standards system.

1. IfATE definition: A dark green occupation, for example wind turbine engineer, which is embedded within the green occupational landscape and delivering sustainable outcomes.

2. IfATE definition: A mid-green occupation will remain the same in overall scope but there might be a need for new knowledge, skills and behaviours to be embedded to enable the use of new technologies and approaches.

3. ‘Green apprenticeships which have been hand-picked by industry experts to celebrate the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III’ (IfATE).

4. Incidentally, we note in the Civil engineering technician example we have given here that one progression path goes into project management – an example of crossover to other occupational maps which reflects real-life career options in a way that the earlier versions of the maps did not.