We must define green skills before we can teach them

In this, the election year of all election years, our governments (and prospective governments) are increasingly vocal of the crushing need to prepare our economies, and our people, for the future we will face as climate change becomes an ever more pressing reality.

But there hasn’t been enough debate about what that means for education policy; how do we train or re-train the labour force with the required green skills? The difficulty is that there isn’t a good understanding of what is actually meant by green skills. There certainly isn’t an agreement on what a definition might be, and this is crucially important if we are expecting our universities (and schools, and further education providers) to inculcate these skills in young people.

Even the most basic questions remain. What is the balance between a need for general awareness of sustainability and environmental issues – an approach championed by fantastic organisations like Sulitest – and the specific skills needed in healthcare, in engineering and in the social sciences amongst others?

 How do we make sure that our graduates are green job ready, and that our employers have green jobs waiting for them?

 Can we even prepare for jobs, and job definitions, that don’t exist yet?  Well here I believe that universities can play a key role. Although there are many higher education courses that lead directly to a future job, medicine, law, and engineering spring immediately to mind, the true strength of higher education is in preparing people to think critically and effectively.

 This skill has helped graduates of my generation to fit into roles that hadn’t been imagined when we were studying. No one at my university had the concept of data scientist in my undergraduate years. Thankfully for me the skills I learned were, in the end, relevant to my career.

This new call to action, launched by THE and UNEP, will start us down that path – identifying the skills that universities can give to students that will shape them to cope with the green future we need.

Alongside this we need to be bold in our approaches, but critically we need to be honest and measure our successes and our failures. This data will help us to inform the ways that work, and the ways that we need to change our teaching to make it fit for purpose. 

We need to shape this debate now. And we also need to move this beyond discussion and into the action that the world desperately needs.

In this, the election year of all election years, our governments (and prospective governments) are increasingly vocal of the crushing need to prepare our economies, and our people, for the future we will face as climate change becomes an ever more pressing reality.

But there hasn’t been enough debate about what that means for education policy; how do we train or re-train the labour force with the required green skills? The difficulty is that there isn’t a good understanding of what is actually meant by green skills. There certainly isn’t an agreement on what a definition might be, and this is crucially important if we are expecting our universities (and schools, and further education providers) to inculcate these skills in young people.

Even the most basic questions remain. What is the balance between a need for general awareness of sustainability and environmental issues – an approach championed by fantastic organisations like Sulitest – and the specific skills needed in healthcare, in engineering and in the social sciences amongst others?

 How do we make sure that our graduates are green job ready, and that our employers have green jobs waiting for them?

 Can we even prepare for jobs, and job definitions, that don’t exist yet?  Well here I believe that universities can play a key role. Although there are many higher education courses that lead directly to a future job, medicine, law, and engineering spring immediately to mind, the true strength of higher education is in preparing people to think critically and effectively.

 This skill has helped graduates of my generation to fit into roles that hadn’t been imagined when we were studying. No one at my university had the concept of data scientist in my undergraduate years. Thankfully for me the skills I learned were, in the end, relevant to my career.

This new call to action, launched by THE and UNEP, will start us down that path – identifying the skills that universities can give to students that will shape them to cope with the green future we need.

Alongside this we need to be bold in our approaches, but critically we need to be honest and measure our successes and our failures. This data will help us to inform the ways that work, and the ways that we need to change our teaching to make it fit for purpose. 

We need to shape this debate now. And we also need to move this beyond discussion and into the action that the world desperately needs.