The shift to a green economy requires the reshaping and reskilling of the UK’s workforce. Andrea Lockerbie examines what this entails and the challenges it presents.
“In its simplest expression, a green economy can be thought of as one which is low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive,” says the United Nations Environment Programme. But achieving this will require the use of new technologies, new skills and new ways of working.
According to the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) report, A Net Zero workforce (2023), based on external literature, anywhere between 135,000 and 725,000 net new jobs could be created in low-carbon sectors by 2030.
Discussing the workforce challenges required for the country’s shift to a low carbon economy, Martin Baxter, deputy CEO at the Institute of Sustainability and Environmental Professionals (ISEP), says: “It concerns me that we don’t have a full picture of the capacity and capabilities that are needed and where we stand in terms of being able to deploy that.”
With labour shortages in other sectors of the economy, Baxter warns that we can’t look at the green transition in isolation, because ‘there will be competition for roles and skills’.
According to the CCC report, sectors expected to see the largest growth in employment include building construction and retrofit; transport; and low-carbon energy supply. For the resources and waste sector, previous estimates from WRAP have suggested that moving to a circular economy could create around 550,000 jobs in the UK by 2030.
Meanwhile, the move away from fossil fuels will result in jobs declining in that sector. Baxter says that ensuring a just transition for people in declining industries will involve ‘foresight, insight and effective planning around how the skills that those people have can be deployed in the new economy which is being created, in a way in which they can see that as an opportunity’.
Back in 2022, ISEP published a blueprint with Deloitte on green workforce transformation. “Through that, we looked at what needs to change in different job families in order for that work to be done in a way which helps an organisation not just survive this transition, but thrive in it,” he explains.
That could be through the application of new knowledge, using new skills, or acquiring a new set of behaviours and developing new cultures, to deliver success. “And depending on the role and function, it might be only one of those things, or it might be all of them,” Baxter adds.
Rapid change in the resources sector
Within the resources sector, multiple factors are changing workforce requirements, from the new Simpler Recycling rules to the electrification of fleets to the introduction of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and chemical recycling. Skills needed range from technical to communication.
Adam Read, chief sustainability and external affairs officer at SUEZ, explains that historically, the industry’s view was that you could buy in the skills that were needed. But this is no longer possible with the scale of change happening.
He believes that lots of different ‘pockets’ of specialist skills are now needed. “And you realise that our sector isn’t geared up to some of those pockets of training, because, whereas we are great at training people that do permitting or run an Energy-from-Waste, because we have the experience to train the next crop, you’re moving into spaces that we’ve got far less experience of as a sector.
“Therefore, you’re reliant on building capability with those from beyond our sector. And that’s where university partnerships, and collaboration with the likes of the oil and gas companies around carbon capture, for example, are important – because you don’t know what you don’t know.”
According to Read, the now disbanded Green Jobs Delivery Group, which was formed under the previous government, was close to having a skills map of all sectors transitioning, with time frames and skills demands. It was the central forum for action on green skills and jobs, but has been effectively replaced by the Office for Clean Energy Jobs, reflecting the current government’s priorities.
At CIWM, a Skills for the Future Specialist Expert Group, chaired by Read, is leading the organisation’s efforts in identifying, developing, and promoting workforce skills across the resources and waste sector. It will provide insight into skills shortages, opportunities for cross-sector engagement, and the development of tailored support for the sector and members.
The group is working with other organisations such as the Environmental Services Association (ESA) to map the expected workforce transition and the critical roles needed to deliver a circular economy – information that will be used to engage with the government, including the recently formed Skills England.
Dynamic approach
For Baxter, any work on green skills gaps needs to be ongoing: “It’s a dynamic situation. Technologies change, labour force dynamics change, policy changes, and therefore you can’t just do this once, and think that it’s been delivered across the country and that it will do us for the next 10 years. It doesn’t work like that.”
There is also work to do around awareness raising and ‘de-mystifying some of the work and importance of different sectors’, as well as recognising that some pathways into learning and development are more successful than others in delivering skilled workers.
“Everybody in the world of work today is going to have to do something differently to help with this transition,” says Baxter.
That means educating and engaging with people across the careers chain, from those in and leaving education, to future leaders who are already in employment, and supporting those near the end of their career into roles where they can share their knowledge.
To help with this engagement, ISEP created the Green Careers Hub to share career stories and information.
Are organisations investing in skills for the future today?
“At the moment, the training that companies are asking for isn’t necessarily the training that they need to build skills for the future,” says Jane Hall, CIWM trainer and director of Green Edge Applications.
“The training that’s in demand is still very much linked to complying with the current regulatory framework. And there are skills gaps in that area, as there are new people coming into the waste industry without a waste background, and quite a high staff turnover within the waste industry and the environmental sector. So, there is still a need for that compliance training.”
Hall’s insight is confirmed by Jacqui Brunton-Douglas, CIWM’s learning and development product manager, who agrees that the courses in demand are the ones led by legal and regulatory compliance.
The most popular courses this year are Hazardous Waste and Hazardous Waste Classifications and Coding, with 20% of learners booked on them. These two courses were also in demand in 2024, alongside Duty of Care, Introduction to the Management of Wastes, and Climate Change Adaptation – after the latter had been made a requirement by the Environment Agency.
“If you ask me what we should be doing to prepare for the future, I’d say we need people who can carry out repairs, so items can go back into commercial markets. We need to be looking at the top of the waste hierarchy. But I do understand you are not going to invest in training if you don’t have those job opportunities right now,” Hall says.
Wales is showing how this can be done. The Welsh government recently published its updated Collections Blueprint 2025, which includes a target for reuse and recycling centres to achieve at least 85% recycling and reuse rates. To develop skills, its Flexible Skills Programme allows employers to get up to 50% funding on accredited training for sectors including Net Zero.
CIWM has also started to include elements on behavioural change and artificial intelligence into some training courses, after discussion with employers and its tutor network. These topics are covered as part of its ‘advanced pathway’ training, and are also available as standalone courses. Behaviour change has also become popular on bespoke courses for employers.
Outside of waste, training can sometimes be more forward-thinking. For example, Hall worked with a furniture company to put together a whole-workforce training programme to instil sustainability principles, starting with explaining the company’s ambitions, so employees understood why they needed to do certain tasks.
The training then covered their zero-waste, raw materials and energy efficiency targets, as well as how each employee’s role relates to these targets. The business had set up a new initiative whereby customers could return their old furniture for repair, so that it could be brought back up to the standard of a new product for reuse.
So, the training included legislative requirements alongside other important initiatives which went above and beyond minimum legal requirements.
Another good example is the work CIWM is doing with the NHS on Waste Manager training. As well as legislative requirements, the training programme – which was a finalist in the British Training Awards 2025 – covers sustainability principles linked to the management of waste.
Baxter from ISEP also praises the NHS, which used the blueprint for a green skills workforce transformation to evaluate all the jobs in the organisation and embed green skills thinking and sustainability.
Meanwhile, the partnership between Diageo and ISEP (formerly IEMA) shows how employees across a supply chain can be up-skilled in environmental management and sustainability.
Selling the sector as it evolves
For Read, there is ‘a big job to do on selling the sector’s evolution’ and its transferable skills.
“It’s not about waste. It’s not about recycling. It’s about critical resources. It’s about the sustainability of UK PLC. So, you could come and do a stint in waste and resources doing green chemistry, and then you could go and work in some other sector doing green chemistry.
“It’s about accepting that it’s not ‘careers for life’, and it’s certainly not ‘a sector for life’ anymore, but that we fit nicely into this group of industries that are all transitioning [to net zero] in parallel.”
With the government’s current focus on energy, Read believes the resources and waste sector needs to re-pitch itself to be heard.
“We’re not talking about ‘green skills’, it’s ‘critical skills’ now…some of us are repositioning, because we recognise that governments aren’t interested. What they’re interested in is a growing economy.”
For Read, it’s about talking the same language: ‘critical skills’ can help grow the economy, and ‘if we happen to decarbonise and deliver resource efficiency, then that’s a win’.
For Baxter at ISEP, however, the term ‘green skills’ still works well to explain the shift needed and start conversations, although it also uses the language of ‘transformational skills’ and ‘transition skills’.
What about the government’s role?
Within resources and waste, Read doesn’t believe we need more policy; we need delivery. What he would like to see is more joined-up, cross-departmental alignment on the low carbon transition between the various government departments such as Education, Work & Pensions, Defra and Energy Security and Net Zero – so that everyone is working in the same direction.
The view from industry has always been that government needs to provide clarity and certainty, and investment and delivery will follow.
Read says: “With reuse and repair, we have people that specialise in it, we’re growing it all the time, but we’re not growing it by tens of thousands because the market is not ready for it, so why would we invest?
“This is where government needs to play a key role. If government were to require local authorities to have a reuse and repair plan that sat alongside their recycling targets, then I know I am going to be asked a lot more often to create reuse and repair solutions – and I’d start to work on the workforce that was going to be available to deliver that.”
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