There are myriad opportunities now available for those who want to qualify or upskill in the area of sustainability. The upsurge in educational offerings mirrors a spike in demand for green skills in the workforce, meaning those who add sustainability qualifications to their credentials are well placed to advance their careers.
A report by LinkedIn in 2023 showed that demand for green skills worldwide is outpacing supply, raising the prospect of an imminent green skills shortage. In the year to February 2023 the share of job postings requiring at least one green skill grew by more than 22 per cent.
Yet only one in eight workers has one or more green skills at a time when the transition to a more sustainable economy is driving demand for such skills across all industries, including the most carbon intensive; the share of auto workers with EV skills rose by 61 per cent between 2018 and 2023, for example.
In Ireland, educational offerings in sustainability range from undergraduate and postgraduate courses to short programmes such as micro-credentials.
Dr Ciaran O’Carroll, lecturer in sustainability and enterprise at TUD, describes the level of interest among students in the university’s courses in the area as “extraordinary”.
“The level of engagement from students is unlike any other class that I teach,” he says. “They see the importance of this for their careers and their lives in general as it is so transformative.”
He sees the pace of change in education in the space as reflecting that in the real world: “The rate of change is so fast. The more the world fails to act, the more the education has to change to keep up.”
For students studying traditional business and enterprise models, sustainability can add an interesting dimension.
“From a teaching point of view, it is quite counterintuitive‚” says O’Carroll. “You can be learning the best marketing techniques and frameworks and then you can go into another classroom and learn about sustainability, planetary boundaries and de-growth. Students can feel the difference in the paradigm of those lessons and it interests them a lot.”
Sustainability, by its nature, involves taking a longer-term approach, O’Carroll notes, something TUD encourages students to think about.
“When you are choosing to make an investment, you need to [choose] long-term, sustainable solutions that will deliver over time, rather than those that will deliver the maximum return over the short term,” he says. “Take a business involved in agriculture. Are you going to buy land that is the cheapest now but that in four or five years is going to be drought ridden, or invest in the land that might not generate the highest return now and might require investment that will reap a return over decades ahead? Being able to analyse a business decision today and see what that that looks like over 10 or 20 years is really important ... We try to train student to think in that way.”
At UCD Innovation Academy, which runs a professional diploma in innovation for sustainability, providing students with a grounding in design thinking is key, says Thomas Macagno, education innovation lead in sustainability at the academy.
“We focus on understanding what are the economic drivers of sustainability and what are the human drivers,” he explains. “It’s about giving people sustainability literacy. We are not trying to make you an expert in a very narrow area but rather giving you an understanding of the big environmental and social systems and how they interact.”
The academy consulted industry when creating its course, Macagno says; rote learning, he adds, is not a feature of its programmes.
“We don’t do exams, ask students to read long academic books or write abstract reports.”
Instead, students undertake a climate change adaptation plan, a sustainability report and then a final big project that could be community based or for a business organisation, he explains.
An alternative to a longer course is MicroCreds, which add green skills to your academic arsenal in a quick, flexible way that fits around personal and work commitments, according to David Corscadden of the Irish Universities Association.
Microcreds.ie brings together micro-credential offerings from seven Irish universities: DCU, Maynooth University, TCD, UCD, University of Galway and University of Limerick. The initiative is funded by the Higher Education Authority Human capital Initiative and is led by the Irish Universities Association in partnership with the participating universities.
“Our MicroCreds partner universities have developed a number of different micro-credentials looking at different aspects of sustainability,” says Corscadden. “These include Green Care: Policy and Practice, in University College Dublin, which looks at how human interaction with natural environments helps address the current environmental and societal challenges, and Climate Leadership Development, in Trinity College Dublin, which sets out to develop climate leadership and sustainability knowledge and skills.
“Our partners have also developed a wide range of courses that examine specific sustainability issues within industries, such as Modern Methods of Construction, at University of Galway, which is looking at how we can make Irish construction more sustainable. Another example is Progressing Towards Sustainable Industry, which sets out to help learners assess the sustainability of projects.”
Upskilling up in this area is certainly a good way of enhancing students’ employability, says O’Carroll.
“The opportunities include going into a job that has the word sustainability in the title,” he adds. “But what we are also seeing is that [other] roles, across operations, have to have an understanding in sustainability, so there’s a very broad spectrum of opportunities.”