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Andrew Raingold, Executive Director of the Aldersgate Group chaired the discussion and introduced the initiative.

In the aftermath of the Autumn Statement, there has been a lot of talk about falling growth and rising borrowing but much less focus on developing the skills that will be required for a new and competitive economy, both now and in the future. The Skills for a New Economy event marks the start of a new initiative between the Aldersgate Group (AG) and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), bringing together the influence and expertise of the AG membership with the EMF’s inspirational vision and hands on experience of working with both business and education.

Dame Ellen MacArthur has spent five years talking to CEOs, young people, education experts and scientists to understand how we use resources and how they are essential for everything we do.

“The circular economy involves innovations from both a biological and technical perspective but at its heart lies the simple fact that if you can cycle materials, using renewable energy, maintaining them at the same quality you have re-designed a system which can work in the long term.”

One challenge that the circular economy has addressed is getting a generation of young people to grasp the opportunities of the future and become excited about subjects like science, technology, engineering, maths and design. It offers is a coherent framework within which young people can design things differently, and in fact, evolve our economy to one which can work long term.

“There are a lot of companies out there needing skills in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) subjects” alongside material scientists, designers, manual labourers and others. “When we’re talking about a circular economy we’re not talking about specific subjects, we’re talking about linking all these subjects together to re-design the whole system, the way we make things, the way we disassemble things.” Organisations “putting the circular economy into practice are actually those companies who are not just being resource efficient but using their resources in a completely different way.”

John Edmonds, Skills Workstream Lead of the Aldersgate Group discussed how the “transformation of the economy requires a transformation of thinking” and a focus on adaptation is “the key to the creation for the skills of the future, rather than starting from scratch”.

This agenda is a cross sectoral issue. “To say that there are going to be some green skills and some green jobs is very misleading. If you’re going to transform the economy, you are going to change jobs in a very substantial way.” Instead of learning small precise skills delivered through short periods of training, we need a much “wider values based and theoretical base for the training so that adaptation could be made more easily”.

STEM skills are “not sold with any sort of inspiration or intelligence and in fact many schools are frankly undersupplied with the people who can teach these skills”. Communication, branding and ensuring teachers are in place is important for developing the skills of young people for the new economy.

There is a lot of focus on educating young people and “there seems to be at this moment a stripping away of re-skilling opportunities for adults”. People are being abandoned mid career because they cannot change direction and if “the funding is not there to provide that re-skilling, then when they lose their jobs they see no hope in the future”. The current workforce needs to be seen as having an “opportunity of changing direction, of taking on new skills, or preparing for the new economy”.

The AG Mind the Gap report concluded that if you start examining the skills needs of a country that wants to transform its economy the answers are: more engineers, including design engineers; base training and education on the STEM disciplines; take the skills sets available at the moment and rebuild them, expand them, enhance them, bring them together more; give bigger emphasis to design and engineering issues.

A lot of very important companies say, almost without exception, that they want leadership and consistency from government. Regulation can force a change in industry and most good companies can cope with that change if “the change is a permanent one, if the government’s leadership is consistent and if there’s a lead time so that they can make the adjustment”.

Niall Dunne, Chief Sustainability Officer at BT called for a better understanding of “the mechanisms of how a movement communicates and a simple ideology which people can really get behind”. No matter what position one has in an organisation “you should feel a personal, emotional connection with this and you should begin to see your job as a vocation.”

Ramon Arratia, Sustainability Director of InterfaceFLOR described the importance of conducting a full Life Cycle Analysis to understand where the real impact of your company’s operations and products are. As InterfaceFLOR did not always have the skills in house to change the make up of their carpets, they discovered the value looking outside the organisation for skills; “maybe the solution is from one geek in China or a professor in India or an entrepreneur in East London”.

Paul Turner, Head of Sustainable Development of Lloyds Banking Group stated when looking at the “knowledge and skills barriers in the transition to that circular and new economy so many of the training programmes are based on the old economy”. Exeter University’s One Planet MBA was presented as an example of a progressive degree that’s “taken sustainable development and put it at the core of an MBA” producing “new leaders leading who really understand these issues”. Paul also highlighted a training programme that had been developed in association with Cambridge University’s Programme for Sustainability to help business banking managers support their customers in managing the risks and seizing the opportunities of the move to a ‘green economy’. He also spoke about an event for senior leaders in the Bank who were taken through a series of sustainability challenges including “a type of Dragon’s Den to come up with the best business ideas that they could come up with”.

Cat Hirst, STEP Manager of UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) declared that the key barriers are “a lack of multi-disciplinary learning and knowledge exchange. Particularly true in the environment sector, there is a bigger need for collaborative working.” Through the Sustainability Training and Education Programme (STEP), UKGBC have partnered with the University of Cambridge to develop and deliver a leadership programme for senior business executives working in the built environment sector.  In addition, UK-GBC are working with an industry task group to expand their education programme and “transform the way that built environment professionals go about sustainability training and education.”

Carmel McQuaid, Climate Change Manager at Marks & Spencer (M&S) highlighted the two big gaps that she sees in this area: the need for “a new generation of business leaders at all levels of the organisation” and “creativity and innovation”. Going into schools, speaking to young people and selling them the vision of a new economy will be vital for success. 

Callum Petrie, HR Director of Philips said that “sustainability in Philips’ eyes is not about green, not about energy, not about environment, it’s about ongoing forever solutions.” He emphasised the importance of educating the consumer, such as the overall savings that can be made from energy-efficient light bulbs. Prospective employees are also interested in the sustainability agenda and asking about the company’s strategy going forward.

Steve Wallace, Head of Climate Change and Environment at National Grid reiterated the need to skill the existing workforce as “a lot of the people who are building the future for us over the next decade already work for us” and there is a demand for “engineers, scientists, technologists and mathematicians”. However, this will not work if it is seen as a niche subject; “it’s not just about the engineers, it’s about our managers and senior managers, all the way up to the executive”.

Rachel Disney, Head of Human Resources at RWE Npower Renewables stressed that there is a problem today as there aren’t “the STEM skills in this country that we need to create the renewable energy we need to be able to power the economy” and “one of the biggest problems we face is in leadership and people management.”

Andrew Slight, Head of External Affairs at PepsiCo UK & Ireland outlined the need for finance models to “reflect the realities of the circular economy and the genuinely positive benefits of those investments”. “The transformation that’s needed is on a scale that we haven’t seen before. Therefore, it’s essential to work with colleagues, competitors, supply chains and government in a different way.”

George Martin, Head of Sustainability at Willmott Dixon said that it won’t be possible to move away from the current way of short term thinking unless organisations implement “whole life costing and life cycle costing, and that needs a whole new set of skills.” Rather than having a focus on sustainability, Willmott Dixon focuses on rethinking the way that they do business. One of the most important things is evidence; “to be able to evidence the performance of buildings, the built environment, but also evidence the performance of people”.

Steve Uden, Head of Skills at Microsoft emphasised that “part of the reason why we’ve developed the linear economy that we’ve got is because people are disconnected from the consequences of their actions.” A new charity set up by Microsoft and others, The Best Course for Me, provides potential university students with an analysis of what they will do in the future, jobs they can get and how much they can earn by studying a particular course like Physics.

Martin Baxter, Executive Director of Policy at Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) discussed the new skills map produced by IEMA that “plots a route for people at all levels to build career profiles that enable them to make a real difference within their organisations”. From a professional body view point, there are some evident “challenges for those people who have an environment background actually being able to have the skills to catalyse change in our organisations”. In addition to this, people from non-environmental backgrounds are “given responsibility to make change for a sustainable future in organisations” who do not really know what to do.

This event was supported by BT.