Jennifer Barr, head of clean energy and life sciences, Skills Group, explored qualification pathways to meet workforce needs. Catherine Anderson, director
of environmental consents at WSP, helped identify workforce priorities for the green economy. Sharing some large scale projects, she stressed that
the reality is
that many of them still require traditional construction skills, not just specialised skills. “If you take the nuclear out of
nuclear, or the science out of it, then actually a lot of these projects still involve traditional construction skills and I don’t think we should apologise for the fact that. We do need bricklayers, construction workers and plumbers – these are the traditional things that we absolutely do need.” Anderson and other speakers
discussed how careers and projects across industries such as construction, engineering and clean energy are often made up of highly mobile workforces with many employees being transient or project-based, making it harder to retain talent.
“We need agility within our
supply chain. We’ve seen with offshore wind for example there has been fluctuation with the amount of invested projects that may or may not go ahead. Having that agility in the green skills economy would mean being able to transfer those skills to other sectors, or types of major infrastructure.” She added the need for
transferable knowledge to come through and warned of other ‘pinch points’ within the skills shortage. “We also need the ologists of
this world,” Anderson continued. “We need the ecologists, the scientists, the socialists and the environmentalists to come forward as well. In my remit as environmental consents leader we don’t just focus on the project. We need to understand what is needed for that consent. We spend a lot of time in universities trying to inspire that next generation but it’s hard. There are so many ‘more attractive’ sectors from digital to AI that might seem more interesting to some than wanting to be a geologist, for example.”
“ Creating 400,000 green jobs in the next five years is an ambitious endeavour. We need to make engineering and side jobs attractive from the start and catalyse the interest to join green jobs from an early age.”
GIULIA MARZETTI, MANAGER OF CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY, DELOITTE & EUROPEAN CLIMATE PACT AMBASSADOR, EUROPEAN COMMISSION
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GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
SUSTAINABILITY
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