Of lights hiding beneath bushels
We all know about the obvious green skills. But what about the hidden ones?
When we last looked, 27 countries across the globe have enacted domestic Net Zero legislation1. We see pan-European directives, like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. In the UK, the Climate Change Act of 2008 gave rise to the Climate Change Committee and the Race to Zero is supported by 8,000 companies, 600 of which are financial institutions. Driven by Net Zero legislation, we see greening trends covering business, energy use and reporting, carbon emissions, standards, targets and mandatory changes in use of existing technologies. Alongside all of these run the application of new technologies and the use of renewable energies.
And it’s on all of these highly visible trends that the green skills debate tends to focus, doesn’t it. These are the skills we can clearly see: skills for heat pump installers, turbine technicians, and the types of occupations that fill the column inches of well-meaning rags like National Geographic (although we do wonder how many urban growers there are in the world, really).
Let’s dig a little deeper and consider the waves and layers of reporting and regulation that affect businesses here in the UK. There’s climate-related financial disclosure; streamlined energy and carbon reporting; the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme; the Carbon Reduction Commitment; the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP); science-based targets initiatives; global reporting initiatives; and sustainability accounting standards. Did we miss any? We’re sure we did.
Ploughing on, we see that more than 80% of FTSE 100 companies have committed to Net Zero, and Net Zero Tracker lists something like 4,000 companies, of which 1,180 actually have Net Zero targets. The CDP database in 2022 contained around 18,700 companies, 400 of which are featured in the Fortune 500. B Corps2 goes a step further: we find 1,300 B Corps in the UK across 58 industries, employing 59,000 people.
And all this before we consider the ripples across the supply chains of all these companies in terms of their Scope 3 reporting.
Thinking, then, of the knock-on effects into corporate systems of both the hard and soft types, there’s the design, development, procurement, installation, implementation, commissioning, operation and maintenance of new, modified or transformed environmental processes and systems for impact assessment, environmental management, waste management, pollution control and prevention, legal compliance, environmental monitoring and reporting, sustainable resource management, and others. We’re sure many of our readers will have first-hand knowledge of one or more of these.
Our point is this: these all require knowledge and skills. Green skills. Perhaps new green skills. Increasingly wide, deep, and profound commitments to Net Zero means that corporations are engaging in ‘green’ education and training programmes to skill up their employees in these new systems and processes. Much like the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement, where we saw whole corporation education programmes, we are now seeing the same for sustainability.
Typically, the education programmes we are talking about here are made up of short courses, like the ones run by IEMA which offer 40 courses – 13 of which are certified and 27 of which are not – covering topics like ‘Pathways to Net Zero Carbon’, ‘Carbon Management’, ‘Environmental Sustainability Skills for the Workforce’, and ‘Environmental Sustainability Skills for Managers’. Courses like this are built for participants to rapidly acquire insights, context, and knowledge, and learn how they can apply their expertise in slightly new, Net Zero-oriented ways.
And our question here is, are the skills being acquired in this way reflected in the multiplicity of current studies into green skills and jobs, and in the various measurements of green skills penetration into the workforce? Possibly not.
Increasingly these days, green skill requirements are discovered by using on-line job postings. These are fast-moving and dynamic reveals by tech-enabled actors like Lightcast. Updated at more of a plodding pace, the listings of green tasks, skills and competencies by, say, O*NET and ESCO might well be missing these corporate green skills development programmes.
Where else might we be seeing ‘green’ skills developing in a more ad hoc, needs-driven way? One potentially important source is in the development of ‘green advice’ around domestic energy changes, bringing together renewable energy advocates – for example from the not-for-profit and charity sectors – and residents seeking independent advice on how they might invest in renewable energy options. Skills built and deployed here will tend not to be captured in commercial on-line job listings; on the other hand, they might be caught in more de facto sources like LinkedIn.
It's difficult to estimate the scale of this source of green skills. But, in the UK there are more than three hundred community energy groups and this tends to indicate, to us at least, that they have a key role to play in specific decarbonisation sectors, in particular domestic retrofitting. There are other voluntary Net Zero activist groups too: nature and re-wilding; water courses and quality; and so on.
Lastly, for this post at least, there’s the volunteer sector. Particularly related to the natural environment we see volunteers playing a vital role: the RSPB has 10,500 volunteers; the Wildlife Trusts have 32,500; and the Woodland Trust has a further 4,000. We doubt these close-on 50,000 volunteers are recorded in the green workforce. Nor will we fully know how many of these volunteers will use their charity roles as stepping stones into future paid roles.
Australia, Austria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Maldives, New Zealand, Nigeria, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK. When we last looked.
B Corp status brings not just commitment but also a set of principles on which they operate e.g. transparency, accountability, collaboration, knowledge sharing, influencing others, developing the B Corp status business case, etc.