Strategic Partnership for a common Green Job Vocational Training

Strategic Partnership for a common Green Job Vocational Training

The green economy offers enormous opportunities for job creation, many of which are already underway in the European economy. These opportunities range from sectors traditionally associated with an environmental content – such as renewable energies or recycling – to other activities that represent emerging sectors in green jobs – such as sustainable mobility – and to activities in ‘established sectors’ which have potential for conversion into sustainable activities such as construction. On its current trajectory as much as 2 million new jobs are to be created in the European Union (ILO, 2018). The recently established Green New Deal should give further impetus to this trajectory.

However, as the European Union increases efforts to take advantage of the economic opportunities provided by the low-carbon economy, the need to ensure there is a workforce with the skills required to exploit those opportunities becomes more pressing. Europe needs to ensure that their support for skills and training matches the focus and ambition of their strategies for promoting investment in green innovation and infrastructure.

Every job can potentially become greener. Understanding the environmental impact of a job, and its possible contribution to greener economies, needs to be mainstreamed into education and training systems. Integrating sustainable development and environmental issues into existing qualifications and capturing new and emerging skill needs on the greening job market are an extensive and crucial task.
This is why the Strategic Partnership for a common Green Jobs Vocational Training unites both conventional and green job-specialised vocational training centres from various European countries in order to co-develop a Europe-wide training programme, adapting the existing vocational trainings to the new demands created by a greening of the economy. Our project aims to adapt the trainings provided in the different schools to the needs and possibilities offered by a changing labour market. As we believe in the sharing of good practices and collective intelligence, we wish to co-establish a toolkit allowing different schools to propose both new vocational training courses for jobs in the green sector and to green the ongoing training courses in traditional sectors. From each country, a green-job-specialized and a conventional training centre will be integrated, allowing to integrate different points of views as well as respective challenges and know-how.

During 30 months, 3PA would lead the project partners to create the following outputs: each partner school will work on proposing at least one of the courses co-developed in the common European curriculum and participate in the creation of a step-by-step guide that allows training centres in different European countries to propose vocational trainings in the green sector. The beneficiaries of our project would thus be schools specialized in green sector vocational training as well as conventional training centres looking to equip their students with the skills demanded in the current and future green economy.

To achieve this goal multiple steps and activities are foreseen. After the kick-off meeting in which the partner organisations get to know each other and the activities and objectives of the project are laid bare, we wish to establish a better comprehension of the different practices, political contexts and educational system in the different countries. This is why we ask our partners to record the different training courses offered by each school and to identify the potential and challenges in integrating green job training in their educational environment and their specific structure. Thereafter an exchange period is foreseen during which we collectively try to find ways to best use the potential presented and find solutions to the challenges identified. At the same time this documentation also serves as a tool to identify what our courses already have in common and how we could integrate our different approaches into one common training programme. Building on that collaboratively acquired knowledge, every school should at the end of the exchange period enter into action and establish a provisional green job vocational training adapted to their public and organisation. In order to evaluate the quality of the newly created or adapted training course, a student exchange is foreseen. Each school will receive the students of a partner school in order to experiment the training course and to give constructive feedback on it. Once the students have returned to their home countries, the partners revise their training programmes and methodology according to the feedback in close cooperation with the partner organisations. Building on these experiences a collective guide for the establishment of green vocational training will be drafted by all partner organisations collectively that should be valid throughout Europe.

The expected outcomes of this project is to facilitate the establishment of an European-wide offer of green vocational training as well as an increased visibility for the opportunities of a greening of the economy in terms of both economic growth and job creation.