Fitting the frame to the picture
This week, we're mostly thinking about green skills frameworks. Apologies, Frans...
For reasons that may become apparent over the next few weeks or months, The Green Edge has been thinking more than usual1 about the form, fit and function of what we might call a ‘definitive’ UK green skills framework. We’ve almost been thinking about what such a framework would look like if we built it ourselves…
…not that we’re about to do that, mind. There are many learned folk out there who are much more qualified to do that, and to map out its use cases – like those for public employment services, HR departments, research bodies and VET providers described in this ESCO technical report - than us. But, in the course of researching and writing for The Green Edge, we’ve looked at many of the skills frameworks – green and otherwise – in circulation and we offer a few musings on the subject in this post.
First off, why do we even need a UK green skills framework? Karlis Kanders and Cath Sleeman of Nesta made a good case for a general UK skills framework as well as proposing one back in 2021, citing its value in ‘providing a common language for frictionless communication between workers, employers, educators and learners’ and pointing to a particularly potent framework, SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG)2, which in its own words, ‘promotes a culture and holistic system of lifelong learning and strengthens the ecosystem of quality education and training in Singapore.’ Substitute ‘UK’ for ‘Singapore’ in that last sentence and there you have it.
We would add that, while we’re already seeing green skills frameworks emerge for specific sectors or corporations (as we’ll see later in this post), the continuing tendency to conflate ‘green jobs’ with ‘green skills’ misses the important point, to quote a recent post by City & Guilds that:
A common understanding of green skills is that they are solely relevant to more traditionally green industries but as we collectively focus more on our environmental impact, we are creating an employment market in which all jobs are becoming green jobs.
Source: City & Guilds
So, like IT which spans across pretty much all sectors and touches almost every job – and, as we shall see, has a dedicated skills framework of its own in its Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) – we would argue that a Green Skills Framework would serve a similar purpose; driving entry, upskilling, reskilling, transition moves, career progression, and supporting people being displaced within and across companies and sectors through the Net Zero transition.
Ruminating for a little longer on this continuing conflation between ‘green skills’ and ‘green jobs’, it’s a common observation but it does continue, seemingly, to be a problem at government level. DfE’s Unit for Future Skills (UFS) looks like it might be a good place to find general skills data, both green and non-green. But, starting from its stated purpose of ‘aim[ing] to improve the quality and availability of data on skills and jobs’ (italics are ours), the information dashboards offered by UFS so far are predominantly focused on career pathways and educational outcomes, rather than on skills themselves. UFS’s local skills dashboard looks like it should be closer to the mother lode, but it isn’t, not yet at least; the skills section limits itself to presenting stats on education and apprenticeships achievements, KS5 positive destination rates, and people with a qualification at level 3 or above. All good Office-of-National-Statistics-type stuff, but not much good as yet for identifying actual skills, green or otherwise.
These days, the skills bootcamps at least provide a few more nods toward green skillsets that could span occupations or even sectors. The bootcamps in the North East provide one or two good examples, including green skills linked with lean manufacturing and strategies for a sustainable and circular economy3. But, looking at apprenticeships, in our view IfATE limits anyone looking to acquire broad-based green skills by doggedly sticking with apprenticeships tied to (occasionally notional) occupations.
Climbing off the soapbox, we do note that one of UFS’s priorities for 2023 is ‘conducting research projects on future skills demand forecasting and a UK-specific skills taxonomy’, Now that’s more like it – hopefully this will be a useful milestone in what the new Net Zero Growth Plan affirms to be ‘[UFS] building a jobs and skills data ecosystem, which will help identify skills mismatches at an individual, sectoral, and economy-wide level.’
So, which skills taxonomies might UFS be looking at in its research? Well, UFS’s partial predecessor, the Skills and Productivity Board (SPB), produced a review of skills taxonomies as part of its legacy when it was disbanded in May 2022. The review covered the US Occupational Network (O*NET), The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO); and the aforementioned frameworks from SFIA, Singapore and Nesta. We don’t know how much value UFS placed on this review, but we do know that the SPB made a decision somewhere along the line (yes, we did read their meeting minutes) to lean towards O*NET. So we assume UFS, if not going with O*NET lock, stock and barrel, is at least giving it some degree of bandwidth in its thinking on a skills framework for the UK.
Now, we’re not against O*NET. In fact, we’ve used it quite successfully in a number of our projects in the past. But we do know it has its critics as being a bit outdated and complex in the way it’s structured and some of the vague terminology it uses. It is, however, based on a rolling survey of incumbents and analysts in something like eleven hundred occupations over many years, so it’s not to be sniffed at.
With our Green Edge hats on, though, our problem with O*NET is that we don’t find it very good at describing green skills. Granted, there are listings of green enhanced-skills occupations and green sectors like green construction, but the underlying classification of occupations and tasks as green or otherwise was done back around 2011/12 in O*NET releases 16.0 and 17.0. This classification was removed in 2020 in release 24.2, when O*NET also introduced a new classification of occupations. Time, the green economy and O*NET itself have all moved on: when we last looked, by the way, O*NET is now at release 27.2.
Somewhat better in our humble opinion at listing green skills is ESCO, which in its latest version (v1.1.1) now contains a taxonomy of skills for the green transition. While the ESCO taxonomy is inconsistent in places (see example below) it does at least (mostly) organise skills into hierarchies in a way that we can see being useable for translating into, say, educational outcomes.
Image: TGE from ESCO Green Skills collection
Another thing we think is important is that ESCO recognises the concept of a competence and its link to knowledge and skills. It even provides a nice example in its ESCOpedia reference:
Working as a ‘civil airline pilot’ requires the competence to combine knowledge on ‘emergency procedures’ and ‘equipment malfunctions’ with skills on ‘reading position coordinates’ and ‘following the air route’. This application of knowledge and skills takes place in a partly unpredictable setting where technical and organisational problems occur on a daily basis and where solutions have to be immediately identified and applied – either by the pilot alone or through team-working (e.g. involving the cabin crew or the ground staff).
Source: ESCO
We’ve always thought it a pity that, having made this nice distinction, competences and skills are not listed separately in ESCO, but instead are grouped into a single data entity called skill/competence. Oh well, can’t have everything we suppose; we’d still choose ESCO over O*NET as a starting point for defining our ideal green skills taxonomy.
Top 30 key words in ESCO Green Skills collection. Image: TGE using ESCO v1.1.1 preferredLabel data.
But wait, there are others. CEDEFOP’s Apprenticeships for greener economies and societies (2022) is an interesting read and includes these two good examples of green competency frameworks:
Technology and business competency assignment to green skills in multi-level hierarchy allow for a differentiated VET portfolio. Source: Siemens AG, internal.
A new competence framework for the energy-intensive industry. Source: Roland Berger (2021)
These could, of course, be seen as one-trick ponies in the Big Top of skills frameworks. The first is specific to one corporation, albeit a massive one, while the second is a bit broader but still restricted to the energy-intensive sectors. We might also point to something like the ALLBATTS skill cards, developed for the burgeoning battery sector by the European Alliance for Batteries Technology, Training and Skills and cross-referencing both ESCO and the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). And of course there’s the good work being done by IEMA with its Sustainability Skills Map and listings of green skills in its Green Careers Hub.
But this gets us in our thinking to an important point: while O*NET, ESCO and these others are all referred to as frameworks, what would constitute the ideal framework to skill up the UK for the most important job of all – doing its bit to save the planet?
Image: SFIA Foundation
In terms of form, fit and function we’ve long thought that SFIA is the closest we’ve seen to what we might call a ‘complete’ skills framework. In form, it recognises competences and – importantly – levels of competence; take a look at this example for Asset Management (a green skill, by the way). In fit, it’s been designed and built specifically for the Information Age, which spans every sector and is continuously evolving – as is SFIA itself through its curation and management process.
In function, it provides views on the overall skills taxonomy that provide quick-start lists most relevant to a selection of professional disciplines, industry topics and complementary frameworks. Views in the current version (SFIA 8) include Digital Transformation, DevOps and Data Science. Since we’re all generally agreed that many green skills are digital skills, like the Asset Management example above, we wouldn’t be too surprised to see a Green Economy view coming from SFIA in a future release.
…and that gets us to our final, critical point. Who would take ownership, manage and curate our shiny new UK Green Skills Framework? One of the main strengths of SFIA is that it is a living, breathing thing, with resources behind it to ensure it keeps pace as the digital economy evolves. The green economy is also evolving – rapidly – and a green skills framework needs to be managed along the same lines. Alarm bells ring with us, therefore, when we hear that it’s in the hands of the Westminster and Whitehall machines. Need we say more?
Not that we’re volunteering for the job, mind.
…which is usually quite a lot.
SSG covers 1,500 occupations/jobs across 30 sectors and lists 51,000 abilities, 55,000 knowledge types, 8,000 technical skills and 21,000 key tasks - pretty comprehensive!
We haven’t embedded the link for this course, because it’s broken in the bootcamp page. This is a common problem and we wonder how many people are put off doing bootcamps through frustration in finding out more information.