Following this year’s Green Careers Week Jack Kidder, Responsible Business Manager at property developers Henry Boot, says the construction industry must build a climate-smart workforce to ensure the future success of the sector.
In March this year the UN Environment Programme published its Global Status Report for Building and Construction. It showed that the sector was responsible for a staggering 37% of global carbon emissions in 2022.1 Addressing this figure will involve cross-sector co-ordination and improvement across our supply chains, construction methods and approach to older assets. Yet none of this will be possible without a more sustainability-conscious workforce.
So, how do construction and development leaders ensure that their future employees have the green skills needed to help their businesses reach net zero targets?
Collaboration
In recent years, we have seen construction businesses establishing relationships with local universities and research institutions to leverage sustainability expertise in a cost-effective manner and gain access to a wealth of young talent. Indeed, partnering with academia provides businesses with a useful route to recruitment, showing increasingly climate conscious young people that green skills are needed in all industries.
The benefits for researchers and their institutions are also clear. With opportunities for sustainable innovation in our use of building materials, methods of construction, manufacturing and supply chain, and even staff efficiency, the construction sector offers researchers great opportunities for pushing their research forwards. Formal pathways like Knowledge Transfer Partnerships have already helped businesses to make strides in facilitating this collaboration.
Earlier this year, we employed a PhD student from Sheffield Hallam University as our first Climate Change Research Assistant, allowing us to access leading research and expertise, with the real-life experience and insight also supporting the student’s own academic development and research.
Branching out
But construction and development businesses still need to cast a wider net when recruiting. Although hugely important for industry innovation, partnerships with researchers and students in higher education don’t maintain sustainable change on their own. We need to also ensure that we’re reaching students who may not have previously considered a career in green development, or experienced professionals who may be looking for a career change.
A key theme of this year’s Green Careers Week was that green careers can be found across all industries. This is because green skills refer to a sustainability-first way of thinking, rather than a specific bank of knowledge. A recent report from Climate Change Coaches and Oxford Brookes Business School found that only 8% of sustainability professionals now consider technical skills more important than soft skills, meaning transferrable abilities lie at the heart of a green-skilled workforce.2 Therefore, future players in greening the built environment will not have necessarily completed qualifications that are immediately relevant.
Construction companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they only search out future talent in obvious places. By picking out future employees that haven’t already identified sustainability in construction as a viable career route, businesses can seek out a more diverse recruitment pool, ensuring a workforce with varied ways of tackling the environmental crisis.
Looking forward
The construction industry still has a long way to go if it is to reach the government’s 2050 net zero target. We’re targeting this through our Responsible Business Strategy, our framework for delivering environmental and social benefits. We recognise that to help improve the sector’s carbon emissions, we’ll need to recruit and retain a group of talented people from a range of diverse backgrounds, and who are receptive to learning green skills.
Green skills now form the future of the workforce. Most importantly, these skills are not exclusive or unobtainable – anyone can learn them. They’re transferrable, easy to learn on the job and can be adapted to a range of applications.
Businesses in the built environment are catching onto this fact, branching out into new types of partnerships and expanding their recruitment drives. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot to be done to move the dial and bridge the acute green skills gap – a journey that we encourage our industry peers to take with us.
References
unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/not-yet-built-purpose-global-building-sector-emissions-still-high
climatechangecoaches.com/sustainabilitys-new-skills-research/
