Unwrapping the monolith

As investment in Net Zero increases so does the demand for green skills. We talk to NOCN Group about how current educational policy needs to change.

In our kickoff post at the start of the year we pointed to evidence we’d seen during the course of 2022 that, while definitions of green occupations and skills are progressing and higher education is taking up the mantle, we can’t say the same for further education and schools.

We also talked about the role of data and standards. We see data improving in pockets and a general appreciation of the need for a common taxonomy of occupations and skills. Central bodies – in particular the Office of National Statistics (ONS) and DfE’s Unit for Future Skills – are waking up and an ONS workshop we attended recently is evidence of this. But it’s slow going at a time when the Skidmore Report urges more speed in pretty much everything Net Zero-related and concludes (among other things) that ‘new activities will require workers to learn new skills, changing the focus of both technical and academic education’.

Image: TGE. Click to download full infographic.

Why is all this important?  Consensus on the number of types of green jobs focuses and drives investment in education and training. It shapes the prominence of career paths in the eyes of new entrants and those transitioning from their current occupations.

But, as yet, there is no single source of truth. We have followed the creation of the current IfATE apprenticeships framework since its inception and observed the work done by IfATE’s Green Advisory Panel. For any work around classifying occupations and skills, this has to be a good starting point. But when translating the standards into occupations, interpretations vary. In 2021, Transition Economics and Friends of the Earth found 161 apprenticeship standards¹ contributing to the zero-carbon transition. Meanwhile, IfATE’s own search engine has a specific search tag for ‘apprenticeships that include green job titles’: the search finds 28 standards (out of a total of 820) including Low Carbon Heating Technician (standard in development), Data Analyst and – rather obscurely – Fishmonger². Curiously, the search finds no apprenticeship standard related specifically to solar, but we’ll come back to that a little later in this post.

There are other places we could look. Ofqual, for example, where we find well over a thousand green or green-related qualifications³ – an overstatement, since the list includes many which are not currently being offered in educational establishments across the land. Or there are the many opportunities to see the work done by various organisations scraping job data from job sites.

We hope that the current initiative by ONS will help to consolidate matters. For classifying occupations, we expect it will. But it’s unlikely to do so for the skills linked to those occupations. DfE’s Unit for Future Skills should get closer, but one problem we think both of them will have is pinning down the occupations and skills needed by the different sectors. The current SIC codes don’t seem to be fit for purpose these days and we consider they’d be better placed to use more dynamic industrial classifications such as the one we’ve seen recently from The Data City. But that’s a discussion for another post.

We believe one important green occupational concept is that of different shades of green. We saw a good explanation of that recently on NOCN Group’s website and we trust NOCN will forgive us for reproducing its graphic below, with a few tweaks to show some of the qualifications it offers in each shade.

Image: TGE adapted from NOCN Group.

We’ve been keen to talk to NOCN for some time, especially since reading its recent report Greening the UK’s Skills, which we listed in our January reports roundup. So, a couple of weeks ago we were pleased to jump on to a Zoom with Graham Hasting-Evans, NOCN’s Chief Exec and author of the report.

Graham and NOCN are well qualified to talk about green skills and where the UK stands in building the greened-up workforce it needs. Founded during the recession of the 1980s, NOCN is an educational charity that started off by helping people without formal training or education and is now the second-largest awarding body (after City & Guilds) in the UK construction sector. Graham comments, “we [NOCN] are strong in the area of construction, science, engineering and manufacturing, and we have a particular focus around green which wraps in all of those types of industries.

“Greening applies to everybody, but Net Zero will come out of engineering, manufacturing, science, and construction. They will be the major contributors”.

One of the conclusions of Graham’s report – which was written on behalf of NOCN with the British Association of Construction Heads (BACH) – was that:

[N]ew occupations will come about due to a combination of “greening”, digitisation and productivity improvements; these are inextricably linked.

[T]here will be some new occupations created by the greening of the economy, [but] the biggest impact will be changing many of our existing occupations.

So, which comes first, occupations or skills?

Graham is clear: consider skills first. “A lot of countries are well advanced in terms of their skills and we [the UK] are not well advanced. Our report describes the breadth of requirement in terms of skilling and when you look at where IfATE is, it's at the margin. So what is happening is organisations like us are starting to develop alternatives to what IfATE is doing”.

Solar is a good example. As we commented earlier, IfATE has no solar apprenticeship standard right now. If you look closely, it’s kind of bundled into the Low Carbon Heating Technician standard, but that’s still in development. And that also assumes it’s an occupation to be created among the 2% or so of people that come into the workforce each year from the education sector. As Graham says, “if you look at the skilling requirement for green then the bulk of it – perhaps 80 to 90 percent - is in the existing workforce”.

“So you need an alternative development path. Worry less about the occupations and instead work out how we’ve got to train people to install solar panels. We’ve got to have the debate over whether it’s an electrician or a roofer – or both, in a team – and start upskilling the existing workforce with modular qualifications. And this extends to the teaching workforce, which is a major gap at the moment.”

Given this assessment, we can see why alternatives are being proposed. Graham goes on to tell us that NOCN qualifications in solar, currently running in the Middle East and India, will probably be offered soon in the UK. But, continuing along the established track, we ask why IfATE can’t be a bit more nimble. Graham again: “The trouble is they've built this monolith, when what is required is to focus on shorter courses. Like taking an electrician and a roofer and turning them into a team that can install solar all over the place. That type of practical approach. And eventually we will end up with apprenticeships when it’s more of a steady state”.

The pace of technology progress in the green economy is a key factor here. Given the time taken to develop apprenticeship standards and T-levels, by the time they’re in place the green world has moved on. Graham explains that in the case of solar, while the current generation of fixed panels have been in the wings for some time, in a year or so they could be almost like wallpaper if developers like Newcastle start getting to grips and industrialise them.  He concludes, “we need to storm our way through the training with the existing workforce as the technology evolves”.

So is government listening? According to Graham, it’s starting to, but the monolith is difficult to unwrap: “the whole thrust of [DfE] policy is, it's got to be a full IfATE occupation, it’s got to be steady-state, or it’s got to be a T-Level”.

Unwrapping the monolith can still be envisaged, though. Smaller training courses bolted around the existing framework starts the process. Then, progressive unwrapping by building upskilling templates and structuring them into the apprenticeships. The result might be something like 15 training components, some to be used now to upskill the existing workforce, with others changing and evolving within the apprenticeships as green technology evolves. A nice idea – obvious perhaps – but we know from our own experience that the current apprenticeships and T-Levels have not been built in this way. So this is going to take some thinking about. But as the NOCN report remarks:

To deliver the skills for the Net Zero green economy, Government is going to have to redesign and refocus the policy changes of the last 10 years.

Take note, Dfe and IfATE.

The top UK Net Zero economic hotspots in 2023.

Following on, here’s another important question. The UK Net Zero economy is accelerating and skills – already lagging behind - need to first of all catch up, then keep pace. And, while much of the current emphasis is on new entrants to the workforce from schools, colleges and universities, this is a small annual splash in the workforce ocean. We may talk, as we have in this post, about repainting the existing workforce in various shades of green, but who in Westminster owns this? It certainly doesn’t seem to be DfE or IfATE.

So is it BEIS, responsible for business and sectors? Or Levelling Up, who manages the devolving powers of the city regions and combined authorities, who in turn control adult education budgets? Or even the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, remembering that digital is a key green enabler? Or others, like DWP or even squaring the circle back to DfE?

We’re confused, even though we like to think we’re pretty well clued up on these things. Perhaps the Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP) process in England and its comparable programmes in the devolved countries will help our understanding. And we wait to hear what the Green Jobs Delivery Group – a DFE and BEIS joint production – will, er, deliver. We look forward to hearing from them all, along with the 30 million other people out of school and in the workforce.

Our thanks to Graham Hasting-Evans and his colleagues at NOCN Group for talking to us for this Green Edge post.

1. See Appendix 2 of the report.

2. The job title in question is ‘Sustainable fishmonger’. Using this logic it seems to we could put the word ‘sustainable’ in front of pretty much every occupation.

3. To get this number, we searched the Ofqual database using search terms heat (16 qualifications), solar (6), wind (15), energy (145), renewable (13), environment (364), sustainability (61), green (36), carbon (16), waste (47), water (225), electric vehicles (40), and biomass (165) - and that’s before add electrical (309). Of the qualifications we found, around 500 are currently available, 700 are no longer available and 6 are yet to become available.