Which platform, please?
Green skills education and training - online, in the classroom, on-the-job, wherever. It all seems a little fragmented right now. A Green Edge opinion.
In 1982, working my first job as a test engineer on the hydraulic actuators for the new Eurofighter, a colleague and I were given the task of figuring out what – if anything – we could do with a strange new machine that had recently turned up in our office. It was a Commodore PET 4000 and nobody quite knew what to do with it. We didn’t even know who had bought it. So, we pored over the chunky manual that came along with it, figured out how to speak its language – something called PET BASIC that we found out later had something to do with some guy called Bill Gates – built a crude electronic interface that we could link up to the test rigs, and eventually got it to produce a sine wave output with which we could run a fatigue test. Result! It only took us a couple of months.
Today, many of us who were born too early to qualify as digital natives may not remember the path we travelled from our first tentative pokes at a computer keyboard to whatever level of computer literacy we now inhabit. Learning by trial-and-error, by osmosis, or when all else failed, the RT*M1 method is a far cry from today’s googled-up world. But back then for many of us, the incentives to learn were strong as the new technologies tumbled into our lives on the cresting wave of the Information Age.
One might argue that the drive to Net Zero does not carry the same learning incentives. While most people (hopefully) ‘get’ the green message, many of the actions that come with it are imposed – much of it by government – without being immediately obvious why, unless the ‘big picture’ is fully understood. Which, let’s face it, for many people it just isn’t.
Given that a Net Zero-skilled population, if not an actual Net Zero society, is an imperative – which we at The Green Edge believe it is – then one might go on to argue that there is a strong onus on government to identify and cultivate the very best learning channels for the range of skills needed in the run up to 2050. And those learning channels will vary according to the types of skills, the numbers of people who will need them, and the depths to which they must be learned. So, since we launched The Green Edge we have appreciated the opportunity to talk to some learned people about a few of those channels.
At the high-skill end, we see initiatives like the MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance programme, run by Imperial College Business School in partnership with the Grantham Institute. Launched in 2015, the programme is now over-subscribed tenfold and has the highest employability rate - 95% three months after graduation - of all the Imperial College Business School programmes. But as Professor Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute, told us in our conversation with him in early December, “I still can't believe that most business schools don't have a programme like this. We’ve demonstrated it’s successful, we’ve demonstrated students are fantastic and I suspect it's because of the inertia that's built into academia”.
At industry level, last year’s Green Jobs Taskforce report (July 2021) recommended: “[t]o address the skills gap and ensure green jobs are open to all, industry bodies and all employers in the green economy should prioritise the creation of a diverse workforce and should share best practice across the economy”. While we wait for progress reports on this, we note that some sector bodies are already signposting or coordinating green skills training options. A good example is the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB), which currently lists (without necessarily endorsing) fifty ‘Preparing for net zero’ courses from commercial providers in fields like Carbon Capture, Energy Systems and Hydrogen.
Staying with the ECITB list, we note that several of the courses on the list are delivered through Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, with the University of Edinburgh, TUDelft and Imperial College contributing to the list via edX. Not actually appearing on the ECITB list but flying the flag for Britain in the MOOC space is FutureLearn2, which includes, for example, modules on sustainable and green logistics from Coventry University.
Moving on to apprenticeships. After my colleague Michael Cross and I were involved in 2015-17 in the creation of the occupational maps for (what became) the Institute for Apprenticeships & Technical Education (IfATE), we have watched green skills education develop as a crosscutting theme across the IfATE standards. IfATE’s sustainability framework provides a useful guide for trailblazer groups and route panels to identify potential sustainability themes to be built into apprenticeship standards at each level, while the Green Apprenticeships Advisory Panel (GAAP) was formed in 2021 to take a deeper dive into apprenticeships that need to be adapted or added for net zero preparedness.
But a point raised in our recent conversation with Tony Wilson, Director of the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) was the tendency for government to have put all its eggs in the apprenticeship basket. An apprenticeship is not for everyone, so what about the others? The school leavers who – for whatever reason – are not going on to university or into further education? The career changers, job seekers and career returners?
This is where – in England at least – bootcamps might fit in. At the moment, the list of skills bootcamps is heavily weighted towards the obvious gaps in IT and HGV driving, which is understandable. But, especially since several of our Green Skills Survey respondents told us of the difficulty in finding upskill and reskill training for things like energy efficiency improvements and buildings retrofitting, we might have expected to see better representation of these subjects in the bootcamps list. We do note that Croydon College runs a Construction Retrofit Co-ordination course in the South-East, while the obliquely-titled ‘Net zero retrofit bootcamp’ is assigned to, but unlocatable on, the South-West Skills Launchpad. Meanwhile, the even-vaguer bootcamp simply called ‘Net zero’ is assigned for some reason to the Institute of Coding (IoC) via the University of Bath. An email this week from The Green Edge to the IoC’s contact for bootcamps, Deloitte, enquiring about course availability and content simply elicited the response ‘I’m sorry, but this course is not running at the moment’.
Early days for all of this, of course, and we’re only just scratching the surface. But our feeling at the moment is that green skills training and education is all a little piecemeal. One hopes that some joined-up thinking is being done at government level, perhaps between Greg Hands at BEIS and Alex Burghart at the DfE. Perhaps, after Alok Sharma has handed over to Egypt for COP27, there’s a role in this for him too?
Would you like to share your green skills knowledge on The Green Edge? If so, please drop us a line at greenedge@bluemirrorinsights.com.
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