Tweaking the Green

We've been thinking about green qualifications: their status, patterns and direction. But do we even need them?

The Green Edge recently posted on green skills frameworks and asked questions about what form, fit and function the ‘ideal’ framework for the UK might take, and who might be best placed to curate such a framework, nurture it and ensure it keeps pace with the rapidly evolving Net Zero world around it. This then got us thinking about what is actually happening to the content of the work driving these skills.

If we look at everyone’s favourite skills database from the U.S. of A., O*NET, we see that in the latest release¹ there are something like 19,265 distinct tasks distributed over more than 920 occupations.  To save you getting out the calculator, that’s an average of around 21 tasks per occupation. Some are mundane…

Request bids from suppliers or consultants.

…while some, in green terms at least, are critical…

 Assess the existing or potential environmental impact of land use projects on air, water, or land.²

…but all are written to strict Action (Behaviour) > Object of the Action > Purpose/Result, Enabler, and/or Context guidelines.

But how are these changing in the new green world of work? Is work content becoming totally new with some tasks being dropped, or are jobs morphing and, if so, by how much?

The answer, of course, is likely to be all of the above. But here’s the key question in our minds right now: to what extent does changing job content drive the need for new qualifications? The other side of the same coin (to use a metaphor much favoured by the Government, for this month at least) is the extent to which job incumbents can build the necessary green skills organically, through experience and the embodiment in the workplace through employers of practices like the 7R’s of Sustainability.

Image: WiseSip (note, some versions use other R’s depending on application, like ‘Rot’ in a packaging or land management context).

As we were browsing through some recent postings from LinkedIn, we spotted some findings we think are important: there’s been something like a 25% change in skill sets since 2015 for jobs in Construction, with a further 50% forecast to change by 2027. Obviously, being from LinkedIn members, the data could be biased in any number of ways, but we do see it as being indicative of a shift, perhaps an organic one.

New skills are often related to taking on new software applications , like in the construction sector where we see significant skill shifts with people taking up apps like Bluebeam and Procore. User training is often provided, of course, but as we may see with the green world, this occurs within existing roles and doesn’t necessarily call for formal qualifications.

This is potentially significant. We’ve observed that more than a few studies tend towards the assumption that green jobs are new jobs, requiring a pipeline of candidates needing to attend some kind of formal education or training. This isn’t necessarily the case. There are skills overlaps between roles which support the move of candidates between jobs at the same level or higher levels, without the need for intervening training delivered through formal courses.

Also, we wouldn’t anticipate too much pushback if we forwarded the view that many green skills and competences are a case of re-contextualising established skills and competences in a green setting. Project management, problem solving and decision making, critical thinking and systems thinking, for example. Therefore, we think it’s important to scale projections of new green jobs in terms of numbers of incumbents already in role and new entrants or hires from existing roles or from specially designed entry programmes, like apprenticeships, graduate programmes or via CPD. This, then, leads to proper consideration of the balance of the roles in terms of real requirements for ‘green’ education, training and qualifications.

The LinkedIn evidence has an implication for qualifications. If skills are really changing at the rate indicated by the data, and if these skills are largely being absorbed into existing roles without any formal education or training input, then we ask when and where are qualifications actually needed?

There is a line of argument which says we don’t need any new qualifications at all. Instead, we should focus on simply modifying the existing qualifications, from individual awards through to whole occupations. It’s an argument put forward by CEDEFOP in its analysis and review of green skills in Germany and we can see the point being made. But only to an extent: in our opinion this doesn’t directly help with green reskilling and upskilling within core occupations.

Perhaps someone, somewhere should be on the hook to define a set of criteria for when skills adjustments need certification and formal education and training, such as we might see below:

Image: TGE

There are other factors too: regulatory and insurance contexts; licence-to-practice; government policy to promote entry qualifications. The policy thing is particularly interesting: as funding taps get turned on and off, actors like FE colleges and awarding bodies switch to chase the money. At the moment, the apprenticeship tank has a head of pressure, which, as we’ve seen a few times recently, might be great for Levels 3 and up, but imposes qualification conditions – in particular, endpoint assessments – which don’t necessarily work in Level 2 contexts in the same way the older schemes like T2G did.

But, let’s for now go with the flow and think about all these green qualifications coming down the pipe. What form will they take and who’ll deliver them? Well, if the volume is high, the need is now and it’s widely dispersed, then we need rapid, short courses with certifications for essential skills and, likely, safety. This can come through a raft of suppliers, including noteworthy independents like People Powered Retrofit up there in the North West. On the other hand, if skills are emerging and evolving, and are impacting whole occupations – like we’re seeing in solar and offshore wind, for example – then apprenticeships might be a better way to go and this gets us more into FE college territory.

So, how to set these qualification priorities? How to filter out the true needs from the acres (or hectares in new money) of research and information: from IER Warwick’s Working Futures; from the Ofqual database of regulated qualifications; from IfATE’s occupational maps; from DfE’s Unit for Future Skills; and from all the policy imperatives like dropping gas boilers, phasing out ICE vehicles, decarbonising the energy intensive industries, and creating a re-aligned national grid.

The process of developing a new qualification in the current apprenticeship-dominated climate is straightforward enough: identify and qualify the demand; get clearance to develop from IfATE and Ofqual; develop and (re-)submit; get approval; list and launch. But this usually takes anywhere between 18 and 24 months. The green economy is moving at a much faster rate than that and green skilling demands are coming not just from new entrants to the workforce, but from people currently in work, many of which are inside – or even are – SMEs.

Micro-credentials could well be the way to go. They’re stackable, they support portability and flexibility of learning, and they can be developed and deployed in an agile way to keep pace with rapid shifts in the target skill demands such as we’re seeing in the green economy. While ‘Big Education’ waits for the world to green, micro-credentials and their vectors of delivery, like MOOCs, keep up with the world while it’s greening.

So, is there a hypothesis here that starts with, say, a formally trained ‘baseline’ engineer as a core occupation, then builds a portfolio of micro-credentials to channel that engineer into areas of green technology development, green manufacture, installation, operations and maintenance, or whatever else might be needed? There’s a body of evidence showing people often shift sectors and occupations, and levels within those sectors and occupations, without being fully loaded upfront with the required credentials.

Would a ‘tweaking the green’ micro-credentials model be efficient for employees and employers? On the other hand, how much of it would be about mindset and context, and the application of skills and knowledge that are already there?

This all fits in with a set of transition matrices we developed with Cambridge Econometrics a little while back, in which we found some people are precluded from entering and progressing in green occupations and can benefit from skills boosts through something akin to the bootcamps.

While others simply do it for themselves.

1. Release 27.2, February 2023

2. Both of these tasks are given for occupation 17-2081.00: Environmental Engineers