THE WORLD WANTS GREEN TECHNOLOGY, BUT THAT WILL NEED GREEN SKILLS TO MATCH

By Ian Mean Business West Gloucestershire director

Our young people are enthusiastic about joining the green revolution but where are the plans to train them?

Bluntly, we do not really know the strength and breadth of the economic opportunity but if we just consider some of the challenges, they are staggering.

Take the decarbonisation of buildings. It’s estimated that we would need to decarbonise eight houses a minute for the next 29 years.

Mind blowing!

Take heat pumps. Back in 2017 we had 20,000 installed by 2,000 technicians. Today it’s estimated that the installation requirement will be between one million and 1.3 million.

Staggering!

As the demand for electric vehicles accelerates, analysis from the Institute of the Motor Industry, says there will be a shortfall of something like 35,700 technicians by 2030 if training is not addressed urgently.

Around 90,000 automotive technicians will be needed to provide a sufficient workforce to service the volume of zero emissions vehicles predicted to be on UK roads by 2030 – the government’s Road to Zero deadline.

I have been talking to some key people about the challenge of green skills, and in particular, how do we harness the interest of our young people – many of whom we have seen making an active contribution to the climate change debate around COP26.

One of those people is Pete Carr, Gloucestershire’s director of employment and skills, with whom I have been working closely in recent months on elements of the county’s new skills strategy.

“A lot of young people are interested in the green sector”, Pete told me. “How do they progress into those careers?

“It is still quite vague where those jobs are and how they get into them?”

Pete believes that there is an opportunity to pilot work to build sustainable skills that could form part of the provision of what is already happening in the further education colleges with building, construction and some of the associated trades.

So, where would the money come from to set up these type of green skills courses?

Well, our further education colleges are – in my view – rightly risk averse because they have little money to embark on specialist courses in the green skills sector.

Government must help to finance these new courses.

Pat McLeod, Assistant Principal at South Gloucestershire and Stroud College agrees.

“We should now be looking at the low carbon agenda,” he said. “If we need 600,000 heat pumps installed a year by 2028, we need to be training installers two years before that.

“There doesn’t seem to be any sort of training process at the moment.

“Apprenticeships are not the answer here. The ethos of the apprenticeship is that you are working alongside people to learn their trade.

“It is difficult for us to develop courses speculatively, especially as it is in a sector which is intensive in terms of capital costs and cutting-edge skills.

“My personal belief is that if we rely on the forces of a demand-led market we will get there eventually, but I don’t think we can afford the time.

“Lots of young people are interested in green issues but it is developing that into skills and jobs”.

Jason Askey-Wood is managing director of Green Fuels based at the Gloucestershire Science and Technology Park at Berkeley.

Green Fuels has become an international leader in biofuel technology and has a Royal Warrant to prove it.

“Getting the right people in the green skills market ultimately comes down to education,” said Jason.

“Kids are now very conscious of climate change and that triggers interest in the sustainable industries as they go through their education.

“I have a son who’s 19 – he won’t eat meat because of the climate crisis. I know of so many teenagers who are really focused on climate.

“As they come through their education, this is the generation that will lead climate change – not COP26.

“It will lead to a whole new marketplace and skill sets with jobs that don’t exist at the moment.”

Talking to our experts, they all said that the development of green skills and jobs made the study of the STEM subjects – science, technology, English and maths – the prerequisite for careers in the sector.

I have long believed that STEM subjects are key to great jobs for young people, with the role of the engineer increasingly becoming more and more important in every aspect of research and manufacturing.

Green skills fit that bill.

And when I talked to Dr Marc Thomas, managing director of Norika Power in Gloucester, I could not have had a better STEM advocate.

“There are not enough people going into STEM., he said.

And he tells me that there needs to be what he calls “a societal shift” into how engineers are viewed.

Marc says he believes we are now facing what he calls the energy transition, and he added: “The move where everybody has to have a degree because a degree is the thing you most need has led to a lot of young people who don’t go in for a STEM degree and go for some other degree because it is easier.

“This has led to a massive over-education in what quite frankly are useless subjects for a lot of people who could have been much more useful members of society and in much more personally rewarding jobs.

“These are jobs that pay incredibly well even at the technician level.

“We could literally be double the staff we are now if we could get the right people. It is not through lack of funding, it is not being able to find the level of competence in people.”

Green skills for green jobs will be a growing priority for the growth of our economy and government simply must wake up to the huge potential they are presenting.

And they must start now to harness that growing enthusiasm of our young people for the green revolution.