Remember, Remember, Green Careers Week in November
Around the country, 6th to 11th November 2023 is Green Careers Week (GCW). We can’t let that go by without a post.
We’ve written many times now about the scale of the estimates for the net number of new jobs that will be created by the green transition. Some say this, some say that. Some say green, others say greening; some even get the crayons out and distinguish between the verdant shades. Some might even say blue or brown. And in our last couple of posts we’ve written about our view that any number of tipping point events might make the rocket go up and sprinkle demand like the starbursts many of us have just ooh-ed and aah-ed at in the rain-sodden firework displays held in memory of our old pal Guido Fawkes.
The point of this post is not to quibble over numbers: if we say there might be around half a million new green jobs by 2030, we don’t think anyone would criticise us for being either too liberal or conservative. But how are these numbers translated into careers advice to young and old alike? That’s something we haven’t looked at for a while. Let’s redress the balance here – all the more relevant since this post is going out in Green Careers Week.
Image: NCW
Before we go green on careers, though, let’s take a look at the general situation regarding careers advice in the UK’s schools. A good place to start would seem to be September’s publication of Ofsted’s Independent review of careers guidance in schools and further education and skills providers. Granted, this applies to England only, but let’s see what we find there nonetheless.
The executive summary starts with the perhaps slightly obvious but always worth repeating statement that ‘high-quality careers guidance is essential to enable all children and young people to understand the range of options available to them and realise their potential’. Going on from there, we find a mixed bag of findings: in terms of high-quality careers guidance ‘most of the schools and FE and skills providers demonstrated commitment’; but ‘many were limited by the time and resource available’. Not a new message, perhaps, as with the headline findings regarding the balance of ‘push’ young people are getting between academic and technical pathways to further and higher education:
‘Many of the schools we visited ensured that pupils received unbiased guidance that was balanced between academic and technical options, but this was not the case in all schools. In general, a lack of unbiased guidance was usually…due to insufficient strategic planning and attention to the needs of individual pupils’.
Source: Ofsted
Where guidance was found to be biased, the report is unclear whether it’s towards academic or technical pathways. But we think we can guess that one, especially given later in report we read that ‘some FE and skills providers…told us it could sometimes be difficult to access schools’. If so, we think this could be to the detriment of green careers advice: as we’ve commented previously, it can be argued that a big chunk of the jobs for the green transition will be around the technical areas covered by FE, while the more HE-related careers covered by courses such as ES3 degrees – albeit still critical to the sustainability effort – will account for significantly smaller numbers of qualified people.
Elsewhere in the report, we’re pleased to read that that schools, FE, and skills providers are all finding the Gatsby career guidance benchmarks useful. But, somewhat alarmingly in our view, we came up with a duck when we looked for references to green or sustainability careers. Perhaps here we can make a cross-reference to a recent survey of young people by Skills Development Scotland, which found – apart from good pay in their future careers being by far the most important factor for young people, with job satisfaction a distant second – that overall, young people have little knowledge of net zero job opportunities; females are more likely to answer ‘don’t know’ to questions about net zero job opportunities compared to males; and young people living in the least deprived areas are more likely to understand net zero opportunities than those living in the most deprived areas. Hmm.
Image: GCW
Enter Green Careers Week (CGW). This is the second GCW from National Careers Week (NCW) and a chat we had with Nick Newman, NCW’s CEO and Founder, went into our podcast last November after last year’s event. He told us at the time: “GCW [the first one, in November 2022] was a great success. Many schools and colleges got involved, and hopefully it’s the first of many steps towards enlightening and educating young people about the kind of opportunities that exist in the green economy”. We hope so too – we look forward to hearing from Nick again on the outcome of this year’s GCW.
Interestingly, a look through the GCW website brings up a Parent’s Guide to GCW 2023, containing clues on where their little darlings might find green careers, together with information on T Levels as ‘an exciting new option in sixth form education’, apprenticeships, and the value of work experience. All good stuff. By the way, we note another finding from the aforementioned Ofsted report is that ‘parents can be an important partner in supporting informed decision-making but are under-used’ - we hope more than a few parents out there are taking the time to read this useful Guide.
(Incidentally, yet another conclusion from the Ofsted report was that changes in working practices, such as increased home working, mean that some employers have now stopped offering work experience. Chalk that up as another black mark against home working, alongside loss of coffee-machine networking, professional loneliness and 30 minute waits for your telephone bank teller.)
But how does GCW work in practice? We were keen to find out, and coincidentally we’d arranged to talk earlier this week with someone closely involved. Lucy Johnson is Skills Facilitator for North East Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and our chat was a follow up from a presentation she’d made recently about the North East’s green skills bootcamps – we’ve already observed that they seem to be going pretty well up there. We’ll write up that part of the conversation in a future post, but as Lucy had postponed our call by a day to attend an event for the first day of GCW, we took the opportunity to find out what GCW looks like in the North East.
Lucy told us about the schedule that North East Local Enterprise Partnership had put together at the beginning of October, in advance of GCW and in collaboration with the region’s employers, for the schools across the region from the top of Northumberland to the borders of the Tees Valley. Opportunities to educate the younger generation in the work happening within the North East’s green economy included visits to Northern Gas Network’s proposed Hydrogen Homes Village site and a Northumbrian Water treatment plant, amongst many others, as well as signposting to other resources including webinars, case studies and important labour market information. She added, “Through our North East Ambition programme we are working with over 100 primary schools, supporting them to develop and embed careers related learning within their schools, and we've got around 175 secondary schools, SEND schools and colleges as part of our North East Careers Hub. We work closely with all of them, supporting them to deliver high quality careers education and guidance including engaging with employers and the world of work, for example through Green Careers Week”.
So, what needs to happen if we are to make progress on attracting people into careers for sustainability? Several things strike us.
First, we need to continue embedding sustainability and net zero into the curriculum. Young people need to understand their potential career paths, including the various cross-cutting career paths opening up. A number of industry bodies like Energy UK, RenewableUK, IEMA and CIWM are already providing excellent input for this kind of thing.
Next, enhance career maps and pathways with competency frameworks to help illustrate what roles entail and how careers can develop. Frameworks like this are also useful for career changers, mapping out common ground and showing areas for development.
Then, modify the skills bootcamp model to provide key steps for entering green jobs together with career steps for later development. Competency frameworks help here too: they drive learning outcomes and align them with industry needs, as well as building bases for personal development and career progression. Bootcamps also allow for greater local discretion to shape programmes around local skills needs and the needs of individuals.
Finally, reboot careers advice and guidance for the green economy. There’s already a wealth of experience and information out there – use it!
The Government regularly talks about ‘no regret decisions’. It’s difficult to see how decisions like these could be regretted.